


Hall of Mirrors

by wombuttress



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2019-10-19 16:15:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 25,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17604686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wombuttress/pseuds/wombuttress
Summary: Possibility is ever snapping at your heels. You turn and turn and turn and there is always, only, you.You have entered the Hall of Mirrors.[What if the Warden gradually became aware of all the paths not taken?]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Spiritually related to [Samsara](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9085759/chapters/20658688), so if you liked that flavor of gimmick, you'll probably like this one, too.

#  **I.**

 

You have always lived in the tower.

No. There was a time before that. But you don’t remember it. You were too young when they brought you here.  They tell you that you were two years old when you caused the fire in the alienage, killing three. You don’t know if that’s true.

Magic has been in your blood from your earliest memories. The other children had it at six, ten, thirteen, but you may as well have been born with it. Magic is your breath and blood and heart, your most essential self. You hate the tower, but you love magic. No one else does. That doesn’t bother you.

** >>**

Your best friend is a boy named Jowan. He is taller than you, and a little older, but he is jealous of you. You never notice this. He is your best friend and you love him, and the love in your eyes always eclipses the resentment in his.

You have no other friends in the tower. You talk too loudly and too much, and can never tell when people don’t want to listen to you anymore. The chantry sister says that you are a monster. You suppose that’s why you never seem to know how to behave. But you can’t seem to make yourself be different, so monster you will be.

** >>**

When you are older you develop a crush on an older boy named Anders, who is bold and fearless and beautiful. You imagine that one day he will take you away from this place during one of his daring escapes, as though you are a tragic prince trapped in a tower, being rescued by a handsome knight. (Though the knights are all in here, ready to murder any of you for one wrong move.) Jowan tells you to go talk to him. You never do.

You love magic. You love Jowan. You imagine you love Anders. You hate everything else.

You have always lived in the tower, and you will always live in the tower.

** >>**

When you are older still and the walls close up around you and your skin is crawling off your bones, when you are one big scream, you try running away. (This is not the first time you have felt this way, but this is the first time you are brave enough.)

You know that it is possible, because Anders has done it. You slip out during a delivery (you have always been small, even compared to the other elves). There’s fire in your blood as you run across the lake (you froze it with a spell as easy as breathing), and you are free, free, free—

For a while. You have never seen trees up close before, or animals. You have never before known darkness. You have never been alone. You do not even make it as far as the nearest village when they catch you. You panic. You try and fight back. You are not successful.

You are only a child, but they do not show mercy. A holy smite destroys all conscious thought, and a blade tinged with magebane opens your side (they know you are already powerful). An armored fist connects with your head. The next time you are conscious, you are back at the tower.

After that the sickly-sweet smell of magebane makes you panic, and you have a harder time keeping a train of thought.

** >Try again?**

No.

But you do talk to Anders, and ask him what it’s like out there. You didn’t get to see, and you can’t remember what it was like before you lived in the tower.

He tells you about forests and rivers and oceans and farms and villages and cities and taverns and brothels and all sorts of things and he talks for maybe half an hour before he is distracted by something. (You are twelve. This kills you.)

You think about what he’s told you for years and years. You dream of it, so desperately that it nearly becomes real to you, but not quite, never quite. Most mornings you wake with ashes in your mouth.

(Later years later when you are maybe his Commander you will bring this up, and he will stare blankly in unrecognition. He does not remember.)

But you won’t try to run again.

** >>**

One day shortly after your Harrowing (you passed with flying colors, of course you did you prodigy) there is a Grey Warden in the Tower and—

** <<**

No. There isn’t. There is no Grey Warden, not yet. You can’t recall why you ever thought there was supposed to be one. You’ve hardly even heard of the Grey Wardens. What a strange thing to think.

Instead there is only the loss of your very best friend, who did not deign to tell you that he was a blood mage, and then there is questioning (harsh questioning), and then there is the dungeons where you will await judgement for your crimes of aiding and abetting the apostasy of a maleficar, and you are sitting in the darkness crying because you miss your friend (your only friend) and it is weeks of fetid water and precious little food. You try eating rat, but you aren’t fast enough without your magic, and there is so much magebane in your body that you can hardly remember what you once were.

It is dark, and you cannot call forth light.

It is cold, and you cannot warm yourself.

You are hurt, and cannot heal yourself.

You have known magic since before you could walk or speak. You have known magic for as long as you have known memory. Without it you are deaf and blind and empty, a half-sentient beast in the dark, and it has been days now since anyone has come to see you, and while you are laying on your side, barely breathing and stinking of your own excrement, the door flies open and a shaft of light pierces your blind eyes.

It is not a Templar.

It is an uprising.

What will you do?

** >Accept the demon**

You do not even need to be forced. You weep with relief as the foreign presence spills into you, settling into your body like a hand in a brand new glove. Magic, power, _life_ seeps into you, purging away the magebane and the fear and the doubt, and you are again so wonderfully alive.

(You will never forget, how alive it makes you feel)

Your body twists and grows. You have always been small, but no longer. Now, you loom. You suppose that you are monstrous, and you decide that it is good. You are monstrous, but you are free.

** >The demon is called BLISTERING RESENTMENT**

What happened to you in the dungeons, you decide, will happen to no one, ever again.

You will give this gift to the others.

** >>**

A few weeks later a Grey Warden, an elf (who you do not remember, from your forgotten childhood), comes to the Tower. She (might have remembered you, were you not a monster now) is the one who stole your life and replaced you. She and her companions kill you with little difficulty, and move on to the others.

The Warden’s name is Tabris. She will go on to become a great hero, and do many great deeds. Her greatness will go down in song, as the greatest Warden-Commander of Ferelden ever to live. She will never think of you.

You have died.

** <<**

What will you do instead?

** >Run**

You do not accept the demon. You bolt. The Templars have yet to secure the front gates in the chaos, and in the fighting (you have always been small) you manage to slip away.

You run and you run, and this time, there is no pursuit. Any who might pursue you has other troubles to face.  You make it across the lake. You make it through the forest. You make it to the fields and all the peaceful villages.

You want to look for Jowan, but you are so afraid. You would ask the people in the villages, but you are an apostate, and so is he. You realize, with equal dread and wonder, just how very big the world is, and how very unlikely you are to ever find him.

You do not feel free. But there is no one behind you yet. You walk a little further, your heart beating slower and slower, until you have no choice but to collapse in a barn, nestling in the hay until the last of the magebane shudders out of you.

When you wake they still have not found you. You keep going. The village people scare you, and you avoid them. They will know you for what you are. They will alert the Templars.

In a country as rough and free as Ferelden, it is easy to disappear into the wilderness.

Eventually you tire of walking. When you find an abandoned coal burner’s hut, you take up residence. It is lonely, but you have your magic, and the stars above your head. You are cautious. Any that approach you receive one warning, and then, swift response. Word spreads. People avoid you. You are alone, but you are at peace.

It takes months, but eventually they find you. They still have your phylactery. And you are only one small fresh-Harrowed mage, and you have been an apostate for months, in a Circle that has already been Annulled.

You have died.

 ** <<** **< <**

You won’t try to run again.

** >>**

One day shortly after your Harrowing (you passed with flying colors, of course you did you prodigy) there is a Grey Warden in the Tower and you pester him with a thousand questions until Irving reprimands your rudeness, and this time everything is as it should be (you are not quite sure why you feel so certain this is true) and though you lose Jowan (you always knew you would, somehow, though oh you love him and oh the ache is familiar) you gain your freedom.

You are taken away from the Tower.

There is no pursuit. There never will be, not from there.

You have escaped. You are a Grey Warden.

What will you do?


	2. Chapter 2

 

#  **II.**

 

You are a Grey Warden, and you have never been so happy in your life.

There is a world around you, huge and beautiful and full of wonderful people. You have made your second ever friend, another Grey Warden like you, and he tells great jokes and actually seems to like you. And you met the most amazing woman in the swamp, and the King, and even the fact that Wynne (she just watched, all those years) is here too isn’t enough to dampen your spirits.

The blood and blight doesn’t bother you. You’re more excited about the uniform, smart blue and silver, actual armor and not just robes, even if it doesn’t quite fit. It’s yours. You’ve never owned anything before.

You are dying now, and you have never felt more alive (save once, perhaps, in a dream you must have had).

** >>**

Not even when everything crumbles, when suddenly the fate of so many people rests in your inexperienced hands

It doesn’t feel real, because nothing else in your life has been so far. The world feels no more solid than the Fade.

Besides, you are too enamored—with the people around you, with the land, with the taste of new and unrestricted things—to think for a moment to be afraid. You are pure sensation, pure experience, pure delight.

** >>**

For the first time in your life, you are not holding back.

Magic was the only thing you had, in that cold stone place (you resolve never to think of it) and now you have more of it than ever. There is no one to tell you no. There is no one to smite you for doing what is natural to you. It is you and your own soul carving reality at the joints.

Fire is your finest skill, but only now can you let it loose. Darkspawn burn to death by dozens, and you are giddy with the absence of punishment, giddy with the _being allowed._

You laugh your way through your first battle.

** >>**

You decide early on that you are in love with Morrigan.

She is all you have ever wanted. Powerful and beautiful and unlike you she has never not been free. She is tempestuous, perhaps callous, but potent, unstoppable. You want her, or maybe you want to be her. You are terrified to pieces of her.

You imagine this is what love is supposed to be. Two people who are so similar and yet so different. Surely she is your first true love.

You won’t hear a word against her, and there are many.

But you love your other friends, too. Even the ones that try to kill you. Especially those ones, even! The fact that Zevran didn’t kill you after all, and seems to really want to sleep with you, is only indication how much he must like you.

You’ve never had so many friends before. You are in love with Morrigan, you are certain, but maybe you are a little in love with all of them. Life is amazing. Life is hard and dirty and full of darkspawn, but it is the most amazing it has ever been.

In this fever dream of wild freedom, you forget all about the blight in your body and the blood you are soaked with, forget almost entirely about the Tower, forget it all in your thirst for life and movement, and it is not until you see your dearest friend rotting in the Redcliffe dungeons that you

 ** >** **remember.**

You won’t go back. You won’t you won’t you _won’t_

** >Let Jowan do the ritual**

You trust him, your best friend, in whom you only ever saw the love and never the resentment. With a woman’s death (and who was she to you?) he sends you wandering the Fade.

It is here you meet the demon.

** >The demon is called UNRESTRAINED DESIRE**

You are a Grey Warden, and now you are a blood mage, too, just like your very best friend. It stings, that he was not the one to show you, that he did not trust you with this secret when you have always trusted with your whole heart.

But you are what you are now, and there is a thrill there, a rightness, to subvert all that you have been taught to do and be. This is an apex, a culmination. You have no doubts that you will succeed in this, as you have succeeded in everything so far.

You wrest the Arl from the jaws of death itself, because of course you do, you prodigy. Who could ever have doubted?

And when he is on his feet again, and everything is going according to plan—

And he is talking of your plans, and you are nodding brightly, just waiting for the right moment to bring up—

And he is talking about Jowan, and your heart is in your throat, but you’re not worried, not really, until—

** >>**

Your best friend, your very best friend in all the world, the person that you only now are realizing that you love above anyone else, and the Arl intends to give him to the Templars, and there is nothing you can say that can convince him.

You’ve never been good with people.

** >What will you do?**

Before anyone can move, you use your fresh-learned blood magic. Everyone in the room is now your slave. You do this without thinking, without so much as considering. You are powerful. You hardly need to.

The men holding Jowan release him. He falls to the ground, still weak, but you pull him up. You tell him to run, not understanding why your eyes are burning. He refuses. You tell him he better, because you just revealed yourself as a maleficar, and if he doesn’t take advantage of it, you’d have done it for nothing.

He is crying. He is shaking his head.

A sudden thought crosses your mind, something that only your time with Morrigan has allowed you to recognize, a bleary notion that gradually begins to take shape—

You embrace him. He finally goes. Sweat beads your brow from the effort of holding the unfamiliar spell.

You suspect, despairingly, that this is the last you will ever see of him.

Eventually the spell ends. You do not bother to conceal what you’ve done.

They know what you are now. They are looking at you with horror and disgust, even your friends. And you should be ashamed, but you find—

That you are not.

Once the accusation of assisting a maleficar would have destroyed your life. Now you are a Grey Warden, Ferelden’s last hope, and you can do what you like—if these people wish to be saved from the darkspawn.

You tell them so. And they know you’re right.

You smile, close-lipped, and ask the Arl to continue, knowing you are untouchable.

** >But that wasn’t what happened, was it?**

** <<**

You panic. You forget every dram of complex magic you have ever learned, and are reduced to casting pure, instinctual force magic, thundering out from you like a wave. It isn’t even strong magic, but nobody is expecting it—you catch everyone off-guard, including yourself. But you are driven by something stronger than thought, and before you know what you are doing, you are taking Jowan’s hand and gripping so tight that he cries out and you are running.

They will not take him. And they won’t take you, either.

He’s always followed you, all through childhood. You suppose it is some instinct to that effect that keeps him right behind you--that, and your death grip on his wrist, and you are so afraid and you have not been this afraid since you were small and you first ran from the Tower, but now he is with you and that makes everything better. You burst through doors and hallways like a man possessed. You are a Grey Warden, your uniform makes this obvious, and so you are not stopped.

Soon enough you are out, and there is a stitch in your side and Jowan is wheezing badly, but that’s fine, that’s alright, you have a spell for that, you have a spell for everything, you always have. You keep going.

You run from Redcliffe. You run from the Blight. You run from everything and do not go back. You can hide, you can wait it out. Just you and your best friend, the two of you, you can talk things over, you can get past your differences (whatever differences there might be), and it will be just like when you were kids, but better this time, so much better. You are only seventeen years old, maybe eighteen now at most, and you do not want any of this, what you want—

( _you have won?)_

Because what you have realized, quite suddenly, quite sharply, at some moment in your flight, is that what you want is—

** >But that wasn’t what happened, was it?**

** <<**

You clam up. You freeze. You are a child again. The stern old bearded man says do this, and you do this. You grip your willow staff with both hands and keep your eyes on the ground, for you remember what it is to be punished.

They start to take Jowan away and you don’t say a word.

He says lots of words. Apologetic words. Regretful words. Jowan is crying, and not prettily. There is snot coming from his nose. You try not to look. You are staring at the ground. He thinks you haven’t forgiven him. You don’t know how to tell him that you are the one who needs his forgiveness. You don’t know how to say anything at all, when the Arl is standing there, his guards at his side. Your tongue is in your throat.

You manage to ask, in a small voice, what will happen to him. The Arl shrugs, and supposes that it will be Tranquility. You knew that. You should not have asked.

You are calm for the rest of the meeting. You are calm on your way back to camp. You are calm as you start the campfire with a gesture. And then you buckle and sob like a child, inconsolable and incomprehensible, because what you realized—

—what you suddenly understood, as they were taking him away—

—that Morrigan had never been your first or truest love.


	3. Chapter 3

#  **III.**

 

No one ever taught you how to grieve, and you have no idea how. At first it seems too big, too unthinkable, and then it crashes over you like the suffocating terror of a Smite, until you are exhausted of being in your own head, and resentful that as a mage you cannot escape even in sleep.

But you do love Morrigan, you know that now. You know now what true love feels like, and how terrible it is to lose it, and now that the greatest source of love in your life is gone, you are left with a surplus, an excess, a drowning quantity of love. And you pour it all onto her.

For what else could this longing be, this thing you have never quite felt before, that is similar but not the same as the thing you felt for the one you lost? You imagine the life she has lead, of wildness and forbidden magic, of the sky above her head and the dirt beneath her feet. You want that, and you want her, and maybe if she’ll have you, you’ll be saved from the encircling stone walls inside your own head.

She does have you, before too long.

** >>**

Loving Morrigan is like a fairy tale.

If you had been more experienced, if you might have caught the artifice in her girlish laughter and her coyness. You might have noticed the uncertainty in her caresses, the clumsy brusqueness of her movements.

But how would you know? You are a boy who grew up locked in a tower. You know nothing of what the world is like.

(Morrigan, a girl who grew up in a swamp, knows less. You will realize that someday.)

But for now she seems to you a woman, not a girl, a tall and beautiful woman, a powerful woman, and you take all of her pretentions for eminent truth.

It is easy to imagine, the two of you as hero and heroine, daring renegades in a world gone mad. You exchange lines that could have come out of a song or a poem. When she is with you, she’s a different person. Not a softer person, not a more vulnerable person, but different.

You find this comforting. You’re wearing your own mask. You can’t imagine the difficulty you would have in love, were it not for these scripts.

Loving Morrigan makes sense. You play your part, and she plays hers. The fact that she does not love you hardly seems to matter.

** >>**

You start sleeping with Zevran mostly because he wants you to, and that was always reason enough in the Tower, where pleasure was rare and precious. You have always been small, and bony and awkward, and a little too loud and too eager, but there has usually been someone who wanted you anyway.

It was good to be wanted. It still is.

Besides, you like him plenty. He is beautiful and exciting and he also does not love you, and you don’t mind. He wants you, when half the time Morrigan doesn’t even seem to like you, and that’s more than enough.

He tells you, one quiet night, about his lost lovers, and it is with him that you begin to learn how to grieve.

Morrigan is furious.

You don’t understand her anger. You can’t even begin to understand it. You have some vague notion of married people pledging to be only with each other, but you are not married to her; she does not even love you. Why should she mind? Nobody else has ever minded before.

It was never like this in the Tower. In the Tower (you hate that you still think of it, that you could not jettison your history so easily) it was always whenever you could, with whoever was around. Even a weird little boy like you would do.

She doesn’t care that you don’t understand. She just wants you to choose.

** >Who will it be?**

But why do you have to—?

**_ >Who will it be?_ **

You don’t know what to tell her, there with the fire flickering over the harsh planes of her face. But, you suppose, if she doesn’t want to share, she shouldn’t have to.

It doesn’t matter, you think dully. She doesn’t even love you, and sometimes you think that you are tired of loving her.

Zevran suggests, when you relate this incident to him, that perhaps her obvious jealousy indicated deeper feelings.

You have never heard anything so ridiculous in your life.

She said she didn’t love you. Why would she lie about something like that?

With Zevran, it is easier.

** >for a while, anyway**

He gives you an earring, and says it means nothing, and you are fine with that. You accept it as a piece of frivolous jewelry.

You don’t mind that Zevran does not love you (yes, you do), and you tell him so. You don’t want him to feel uncomfortable. You don’t want him to leave you.

But he does.

You watch him, and you think maybe you are not cut out for love, or for other people, or for existing.

** >>**

** >>**

** >>**

The thing about Zevran is—

He comes back. Nobody else ever has before.

Somehow, the two of you move forward. It is not, perhaps, strictly _easy,_ but it makes sense, what you and him have begun to build together. It feels clean, somehow, and good.

He comes back

The ache inside you eases. You wonder if this calm and quiet thing that you carry in your breast, acknowledged and reciprocated, is love’s true form, or yet another phantom to mislead you. You decide to believe it is real. You have to.

Nobody has ever wanted you for so long. A part of you suspects he might _keep_ wanting you, for a long while yet. A part of you suspects he even—

He calls you _amore._ It’s not long before you ferret out just what that means.

The darkness has passed, and he still wants you, and you still want him, and there is a whole wide world out there yours for the taking.

What will you do?

** >>**

You end up in Antiva, a warm country of wine and spices and close calls. You live together in rooms that seem extravagant to you, which Zevran tells you are modest by Antivan standards.

You don’t look much like a mage anymore. Robes are too heavy for this climate. You don’t carry a staff, not since you learned to channel magic through other means. You wear silk and leather, and nobody looks twice at you in the street.

You grow to like that quite a lot.

Zevran is sunshine and joy, eye crinkles and simple pleasures. He is everything you never realized you were missing, and you fall into him like water. You still do small magics, around the house and sometimes in the bedroom, but you never work magic on the scale of which you’re really capable of again.

(You’re capable of quite a lot. The magical storm you caused over Denerim the night you killed the Archdemon did not fully die down for weeks. They will sing songs of it for centuries. One day historians will believe your deeds were mere myth and legend.)

But that sort of thing draws attention, which is no longer what you want.

He wraps an arm around your waist as the sun goes down and plants a kiss at the corner of your mouth. You are not what you once were, and you are happy.

You have won.

** >But that’s not what you did, was it?**

No—it was—you remember—she asked you to choose, and you did—

** >You did choose. But put away your magic, deny your very self? That doesn’t sound like you at all.**

Maybe not. But you were sure, so sure…

** <<**

** >Who will it be?**

You don’t know what to tell her, there with the fire flickering over the harsh planes of her face. But, you suppose, if she doesn’t want to share, she shouldn’t have to.

You’ll tell Zevran that you’re sorry, but you suspect it will hurt him less than it would hurt her.

You don’t want to hurt anyone.

You watch his face as you tell him, and with a sinking feeling you realize that you’ve failed.

He walks away. You feel strangely bereft, though he did not love you, and likely would not have even wanted you for long. Guilt, you think. It must be guilt.

You love him, at least as much as you love all the company you have assembled to fight alongside you. Your fool heart will love anything it can get. But perhaps you aren’t supposed to love him—not the way you are sure you are supposed to love Morrigan.

You _are_ supposed to love her. And you do. You do.


	4. Chapter 4

#  **IV.**

 

The elf in the Denerim dungeon calls out your name with such awestruck hesitance that you stop in your tracks.

She comes into the light, still staring.

She knows you. There’s no other explanation for the dawning recognition in her face. She heard Alistair call out your name and wants to know, is it true? Are you Devon Surana?

You are.

In the darkness of the dungeon, her dirty hands clinging to the bars, she tells you where you come from. Here, the Denerim alienage. You played together, as children, until the fire, until the Templars came. You don’t remember, but she was older. Old enough, anyway. She remembers everything. She remembers how they tried to hide you, how long your parents wept for you, how loved you were, how mourned.

You almost don’t believe her, for how badly you want it all to be true.

Her name is Tabris—just Tabris, don’t ask for more—and she has been in the dungeon for a long, long time. She won’t say what it was that got her there. You’ll get her out.

She shrinks in suspicion from your human companions, speaking only to you. In better light you can see how stringy and thin her filthy hair is, how gaunt her limbs, how sunken her eyes. You’ve seen eyes like that before (in the Tower, those who had been confined—) and a note of fear enters your heart, fear and also love, a love of imagined recognition.

You imagine that you remember her, too. You can almost picture it—playing in the dirt with another little elven girl. The image is almost within your grasp.

(But all your earliest memories are of the Tower, and your mind closes only on mist.)

** >>**

You see her again when you go to the alienage, your alleged birthplace, your first home. You try to imagine being a child here, playing in these streets. You look into the face of every older elven man and woman—here was black hair like yours, here was russet skin like yours, here was a long jutting nose like yours—shattered mirrors, fragments, your people?

You find out from Tabris (she looks a little better now, out of that ragged wedding dress, but not by much) about your parents, how they were among the first to take ill, the first to be taken. They might be dead by now, but maybe not. They’re not letting anybody in.

You could see them soon, maybe, speak to them, ask them if they remember you, if they still want you, if you could just get inside. If you could just get in that building.

They took her father, too. You go together.

You do not find your parents.

You do find Tabris’s father, in a slaver’s cage.

(You have never watched anyone disintegrate that way, you have never seen such fury, never seen such pain—in the Tower it was hidden, it was not allowed—)

After the slavers are dead, you look into the face of each captive elf, daring to hope. But they are not there.

Of course not. They were among the first to be taken. They’ll be halfway to Tevinter by now.

Afterwards, when the captives are safe, and Tabris can speak again, she makes you a promise. She takes your face in her bloody hands, smearing slaver blood on your face, marking you as one of hers and one of theirs, and promises you this:

_We will make them pay._

** >>**

You make Alistair king, because of course he should be king. It is the perfect ending to the story. He is tall and handsome and good-hearted, and he does not wish to be king. All the best kings don’t want the job, you’re sure of that. Whoever heard a story about a king who wanted that fate? You make him king because he’s your best friend, and you have always wanted the best for your friends.

(You make him king because Tabris asked you to. You make him king because of the acid-hatred in her voice when she speaks of the queen. You make him king because of the blood on her hands and on your face, because of the homes standing empty in the alienage, because it was your home, because she is the last who remembers that. For her, you think, you might tear down the sky.)

He doesn’t thank you for it. He is terrified, his terror edged with anger edged with betrayal.

You blank. You don’t understand where you went wrong.

Is this not how the story is supposed to go?

(Can you be blamed for forgetting?)

** >>**

Your tale unravels further with Morrigan’s ultimatum. She shatters all of your illusions about you and her and everything that’s transpired this past year with one conversation.

At first you panic, thinking it’s gone wrong again, the way it went wrong with Alistair. But maybe it hasn’t. Maybe it’s supposed to be this way. Maybe you’re meant to have this nadir, this period of uncertainty. Maybe it will all be fine in the end,

(You have half a memory, half a dream, of this happening to you before, a true pure love you shared with one that once seemed to reject you, who came back to you in the end. You try and grasp it, but like the imagined memory of your childhood in the alienage, it fades away to mist)

In the end you agree. You could never deny her anything.

You wonder what manner of monster the two of you will make.

She tells you that this is the last time you will see her like this, but through the whole of your ritual lovemaking, your mind is not on her and this and here and now. You are thinking of the child this act is meant to make, your child. Weren’t you only just a child yourself? Mages are not permitted children. Is that why you want _this_ child so badly?

You would be a terrible father.

Afterward, you try and convince her to stay, because you have to, because it is what she is expecting. But in your heart you already know.

(And in your heart you don’t believe that she would _really_ leave forever, that she would really shred the story you have told with her so completely. She tells you _farewell,_ and what you hear is _see you soon.)_

** >>**

Of course there is a great battle.  Of course you are the hero. Of course you slay the dragon. Of course of course of

** >course**

When the dust settles, Alistair begs you to stay and advise him.

It won’t be so bad, will it? You’ve lead him along all this way, through troubles worse than mere politics. Surely you can do this for him?

After all, it is your fault.

You so badly wish to tell him no.

For the first time in your life, you are free. You can go where you will, do what you want. Morrigan is gone, like she promised, and she has not yet returned, like you are sure that she will someday. You could take off tomorrow. You could go to Seheron, to Rivain, to the Anderfels. You could go see the world.

Staying in Denerim would mean being shackled (the way you’ve always been shackled.) It would mean walls and rules and watching eyes.

** >Well?**

Alistair is gripping your hand, with his eyes so big and brown and afraid. A pang reminds you of the last human boy-man who gripped your hand and asked you for help like that, who trusted you like that. It reminds you of what happened to that boy, that man.

How could you tell him no?

** >You were never very good at that, were you?**

You become the King of Ferelden’s trusted right hand.

Some whisper that you are the real power behind the throne.

But that’s not true. You’re barely nineteen years old. You don’t know a damn thing about being a king. You wouldn’t even know where to start. You have always lived in the Tower, until the day you didn’t have to anymore. And that was less than a year ago. You are an advisor with no advice to give, but the nation looks to the king, and the king looks to you.

You look to Tabris.

Tabris is only a little older than you, but already she is so mature.  Not the way Morrigan was mature—you are beginning to realize, ever slowly, that a girl hardly a year your senior and raised in isolation could not have known all that much more than you about the world—but _really_ mature. The kind of mature you only got from a life of hard, eventful living.

Once a week you come to her father’s house for dinner. The old man—older-looking than he should have been—does not seem all that much worse for wear. He is just glad to have his daughter back. He is glad to have you back, too, although it had been nearly twenty years since he last saw you.

There is always room for you in the little house. Tabris always has advice for you, always knows exactly what you should tell the king. Her eyes gleam black and clever, so much cleverer than you could have ever been, maybe even cleverer than Morrigan could be.

Her father calls you ‘son.’ He doesn’t mean it _that_ way, there is nothing he means to imply. He calls all young elven men so. But you can’t stop yourself from loving him for it. From loving all of them, all the elves in this alienage that he had helped save. From loving her.

** >>**

You have Tabris and her family moved to the west wing of the royal palace. There’s some protest on the part of some conservative nobility, but you are the Royal Advisor. You are the Grey Warden. You are the Hero of Ferelden. You can do whatever the hell you want.

That’s how Tabris puts it. You just saved all these bastards’ hides, she says. A mage, and an elf, and doesn’t that make them angry? How important you are, how good?

You never thought of it that way. You don’t feel important. You feel like a ridiculous little boy. You didn’t feel that way during the Blight, but everything is different, now. You don’t know what you’re doing anymore. There are practically no problems that you can solve with a well-placed fireball. All your problems involve politics, and saying the right thing, and understanding people’s minds, and you are so horrible at all of those things.

But Tabris isn’t.

You sit up late at night in her new chambers. You bring her wine and candied fruit, because you don’t know how to make people like you, except by bringing them nice things. Tabris assures you that she already likes you. She already likes you very much.

She tells you all about the alienage, what it was like after you were taken. She tells you every memory she has of your early childhood together, everything she can recall about your parents. She asks her father, and tells you what he remembers, too. You hang upon every drop.

Some part of you knows she is using you. Morrigan already took the greater part of your naivete. This, Tabris admits openly. Yes, she says. She wishes to influence the king. And what about it? Has not seen the state of the alienage? Has he not seen the things the Crown has allowed to befall their people?

You and her together, she says. Together you can make it right. If you are careful.

She promises to find your missing parents, to find all the elves taken to be slaves in Tevinter. You’ll get them back, one way or the other. If Ferelden needs must make war upon the rotting carcass of the Tevinter Imperium to achieve this, why—that’s just what Ferelden will do.

Tabris hates the king. You know that. And even though he was your second ever friend, you let her hate him, as long as she might still love you.

** >>**

You become the terror of the Denerim court, you and Tabris. Of the two of you, you are the more sociable, gregarious, the one who always has something to say. You still talk too loudly and too much, and can never tell when people don’t want to listen to you anymore, but these days they listen to you, anyway. They listen very closely, all the time.

Tabris is more reserved. Her blistering resentment of everyone she lives among would otherwise be difficult to hide.

But somehow her presence expands to fill a room. Some have called Tabris your shadow, but the truth is the reverse.

You are still a blood mage, and you have precious few compunctions, when it comes to her vision of Ferelden’s future. Your shared vision. Anything you cannot do the traditional way, you expedite. The nobles fall in line, one way or another.

The ones that don’t—just fall.

Sometimes you think it is for your magic that she loves you. No—it is for your magic that she envies you. You imagine you can see it sometimes, the hunger in her eyes for the power that you have. You don’t want this to please you, but it does.

She contents herself with possessing you. And you are glad to be possessed. The king, she owns body, mind and soul (as do you, you can’t deny). You—she needs only your heart, and that you gave to her of your own accord.

You wonder what the king must think of this. But still, he listens to you. Years down the road, and still he’s in over his head. Soon enough he is taking dinner with your good and clever friend Tabris. Soon enough he’s ready to agree to anything she says. Soon enough she has you both, she with her silver tongue and bright black eyes.

You are not a jealous man. It’s the three of you together, soon enough.

Sometimes Tabris goes down into the dungeons, to ask after the former queen, imprisoned there for all these years.  You do not ask her what she does there. You imagine she gloats. You imagine the former queen does everything she can to resist giving her the satisfaction. You imagine Tabris extracts her satisfaction somehow.

A part of you knows this is madness. A part of you is not so sure. A greater part of you just doesn’t care.

Sometimes you think Tabris just wants to see it all burn, and you want to watch it with her.

The palace runs red with blood. Ferelden is changing.

** >>**

The day the assassin comes should not have been unexpected.

The first few are barely even sporting efforts, second-raters. She sees them coming long before you do, dispatches them with one of the many hidden knives she carries. After the first, she is on her guard—not that she was ever off of it. One she keeps alive, to find out who sent him. The man suffers a long time, but tells her nothing.

But the Antivan Crows are not second rate.

The Crow comes with long and poisoned knives, in darkness and in silence. You had faith in her. You did not place protective enchantments around your room. It is over before you are awake—the fact that you kill him in vengeance means nothing, because she is slain and it is over—

** >No**

** <<**

You don’t know how you knew the Crow was coming. You had no reason to think he would, no reason to think Tabris couldn’t handle anything that came at her. Though you are a mage and your power knows precious few bounds, somehow she seems the more potent of you two.

And yet something makes you worry, that night, so when that night you lay down to sleep, you find yourself unable, and so you are awake when hours later the shadow creeps in.

He dies with his own blood boiling in his veins.

Tabris is up and alert at once, as though she hadn’t been deep asleep a moment ago. She hasn’t so much as flinched. She gets out of bed, and toes at the corpse. She takes one of his blades from his limp fingers, and buries it, with purpose, in his left eye. To make it look like you haven’t just boiled his blood in his veins, she explains.

Does it bother her? That you’re a blood mage?

Why would that bother me? she says, and there it is, that utterly unexpected scrap of envy. She turns her attention back to the former assassin.

She clucks her tongue. There will be more.

There are.

They come for her in dead of night and in broad daylight, in full view of the court and of the people. The elves love their shadow queen, but the rest of Ferelden’s people—not so much. Perhaps they think to slay her in plain sight will rally the people, will show her to be as weak and mortal as any of them.

And eventually they do. It takes only a single lucky shot, a hidden man with a crossbow, to end the reign of the shadow queen, to bring it all crashing down, to break your heart—

** >No**

** <<**

Tabris may be, in some ways, an ordinary mortal. But you, you are not.

You wreathe her in enchantment after enchantment, layering her with ever more complex protections. And she is grateful to you, so grateful, and she smiles at you, her sharp eyes soft with a rare and hard-edged form of love. We are building something beautiful, she tells you, her other hand on the king’s shoulder. His eyes are blank, complacent. A web of words and blood ensnares him.

The assassins die, each in greater agony than the last. You have a keen sense for their methods, an instinct you suppose you must have picked up from Zevran.

The fourth that comes, the nobleman that attempts to poison her at dinner, dies twitching in full view of all the court. You had never done blood magic in public before. Before it had been suspect, if not _obvious,_ that you are a wicked blood mage using your evil wiles to uphold an unjust regime, but now becomes an open secret.

They are afraid of you. More afraid, even, than of her, for after all, her greatest threat, her most terrible weapon, is you.

You, the dread mage of Denerim. The Destroying Angel.  The Left Hand of the Shadow Queen.

It’s not long before the Chantry declares war.

** >>**

Tabris says it will not matter. Orlais is the Chantry’s chief weapon. No Fereldan would tolerate such an incursion. Certainly the people of Denerim despised their shadow queen, but the whole country despised Orlais.

It is here, finally, that her luck runs out. The two of you stand upon the palace’s highest tower, watching the Orlesian army approach. They are coming to kill you both, and against such an army as that, you don’t think you could stop them.

The king killed himself last week. It’s just the two of you, here in the ruins of all your plans.

You beg her to flee, but she will not have it. She will stand her ground.

So you stand with her. She holds you close. Back straight, chin proud. Since the end of the Blight, neither of you has ever had to kneel. You will not kneel now.

She kisses you, the poison on her lips. She dies shortly before you do, and on your breath is a vague sense that somehow it has all gone wrong.

You have died.

** <<** **< <** **< <** **< <** **< <**

You tell Alistair no.

You would have made a terrible advisor.


	5. Chapter 5

#  **V.**

You take up the post of Ferelden’s Warden-Commander, because you have no idea what else to do.

You have been wandering, since you slunk away from Denerim. You have followed up on every loose end that caught your fancy, seen marvels, spoken with ancient beings, gained powers you had not even dreamed possible.

But you did all that alone.

You miss your friends, who have all gone now. Miserably, desperately. Alistair is king. Zevran and Leliana have gone off to their important rogueish business. You get an especially hollow feeling thinking of Zevran in the warmth and light of Antiva City, without you. Shale has gone off to seek their fortune, or truth, or whatever, and you miss them, and you hate that they’ve gone off with Wynne of all people. You don’t miss Wynne. Not at all. Not even a little.

(Who are you without them? Who could you possibly be without them?)

And of course there is Morrigan, from whom you have heard nothing, from whom you will surely hear someday soon. You still wear the ring she gave you, rubbing the band until the pad of your thumb is hard and calloused.

You will wait. You know that is how the story goes, the waiting, the keeping of the faith. You won’t be fooled by her silence, by her absence.

** >>**

In some ways, the job of Warden-Commander is no different from what you were doing before. You spend your days trudging around the countryside, a handful of dysfunctional people in tow. It’s just you and Oghren and the grouchy nobleman you found in the dungeons and your childhood crush, of all people. You keep thinking you should probably tell Anders that you used to fantasize about him carrying you away from the tower on a white horse, but it all feels so long ago now.

In many ways, your life has hardly changed, save that these days you have real resources at your disposal, the respect of all those around you, and the benefit of no Blight hanging over your head. It should be better.

But it’s not. You aren’t the person you used to be. Everything used to be so exciting. Now all you can think about is that somehow, somewhere, something has gone wrong, that you have been knocked off the right path, that you are here entirely by accident.

You swipe your thumb over Morrigan's ring, a soft and growing desperation at the edges of your mind.

You are not supposed to be here. You wake some nights, confused, believing yourself in—Antiva City? The palace at Denerim? A secluded cottage, hidden somewhere in the woods?

You’ve been drinking more lately. Oghren’s one of the few people you can stand to be around for long. He seems solid, somehow, although perhaps that’s just the smell. You sit with him. You drink. You remember.

One night you go ahead and tell Anders about the horse thing. You’re too drunk to remember how he reacts.

** >>**

Tabris shows up at Vigil’s Keep, boots muddy, a pair of rusty shortswords at her hips. She scowls and won’t look anyone in the eye and says she wants to be a Warden.

Your heart leaps to see her, leaps to think she will be staying here to help you. You grin that whole day, until she gives you a funny look and asks what you’re so smiley about, and suddenly you realize you barely know this woman.

Then why do you feel such tenderness for her?

She has her Joining. You aren’t worried. You watch her drink, knowing she will live. Like a heat blur warping the road, you imagine that it was she who was meant to have this life, to have been the Hero of Ferelden, to have been the Warden-Commander. In some other life, she is standing here, and you are somewhere—else.

Wishful thinking. It has to be.

** >doesn’t it?**

Tabris isn’t as angry as you remember.

She prickles. But you remember her blistering. You remember her incandescent. You remember her ready to burn the world to get it back for what it did to her. You remember—

No. You don’t remember any of this.  Of course she was angry, at Denerim. She'd just been in prison. Of course it’s better now. Why does that surprise you? Why do you expect anything else?

You keep turning to her for advice, certain she will know what it is you should do. How is she supposed to know, she mutters? Aren’t you Warden-Commander? Figure it out, she tells you.

You guess you’ll have to.

Tabris slots easily into your little group. She swears and brawls and swaps dirty jokes and laughs sometimes. The first time you hear it, you aren’t sure it’s even real. You’ve never heard her laugh before (but _of course_ you haven’t—)

It’s good to see her, living so normally, softening by the day. But it gives you headaches. You withdraw instead, keep to your chambers. Over and over you spin the ring on your finger, wondering when this will be over. _Morrigan, where are you? Where did you go? When will you come back?_

(A part of you knows she won’t, but a greater part of you ignores it.)

** >>**

You drift through the rest of the year. You recruit a few more Wardens. There’s something about a peasant revolt, something about a coup. You aren’t paying the best attention. You make friends with a possessed corpse, and that’s neat. The talking darkspawn, too, that’s new, that’s interesting. If anything, you understand people like the Messenger better than you understand anybody else.

You sort out the business with the civil war. You try and save Amaranthine from burning, and you fail. You try and go back and save the Keep, and you mostly fail at that, too.

And after it’s all over, and you’re standing in the wreckage, life just. Keeps going.

You go back to your chambers.

You suppose you can leave the Keep now, if you wanted to. But you have no idea where to go. Your friends have scattered to the winds. You have no home, none that you would ever want to come back to. You have this ruined Keep and its ghosts, and you have your research—your correspondence with Avernus, your long study of every ancient tome you have come across in your wide travels, the mysteries of your own blood.

You set your mind to that. Without the darkspawn threat, the Keep can run itself. You inform your subordinates that you are not to be disturbed.

Now, with all the time and leisure you could ever desire at your disposal, you sink fully into the work. You spend ever increasing intervals of time in the antechamber attached to your room, sleeping at the workbench there so often you halfway forget you even have a bed.

If anyone worries for their Commander, you’d never know. Once you realized darkspawn made more sense to you than people, you gave up on ever understanding them.

** >>**

You decide you ought to go to Tevinter.

Tevinter, ancient magical capital of the world. It halfway makes you excited again, reigniting some of that spirit you thought you must have lost for good. You can further your research. See some history.

You are still holding out hope that you might find your family

(enslaved all this time)

maybe you could pull a few strings and

(why didn’t you do this before)

get them back, tell them who you are

(they’d hate you for the time you wasted)

And just as you are ready to leave, you realize you can’t find your vial of magebane antidote. You haven’t gone without one in over a year. You break into a sweat just to think of it.

But perhaps it is time to leave it behind.  You are older now. Stronger. You are not a terrified boy at the end of a Templar’s poisoned blade. You are the Hero of Ferelden. You are the Commander of the Grey. You’ve slain monsters. You’ve lead armies.

Surely you can stand to go without it. You have delayed enough.

** >Leave it**

You go to Tevinter. You see many wondrous things. You witness untold magics. But that is not why you came.

There are a million elves enslaved here. Finding two will not be easy.

And you may be Commander of the Grey, and you may be a hero, and you may be a mage in a country of mages.

_But here, you are still an elf._

When it all goes wrong, you don’t have that vial.

You nearly lose your mind.

** <<**

** >Look for it**

You’ve spent half an hour turning your quarters into a chaotic wreck, when Tabris barges in. Her eyes are bright and wild and she is brandishing a shortsword at your thin chest, and if you go without her to Tevinter she swears to the Maker that she’ll kill the both of you herself.

You put your hands up and ask if she would like to come.

It seems so obvious now. The slavers took your unremembered parents. They took more than half of everyone she knew.

Isn’t that why she came here? Isn’t that why she drank poison for the right to die in battle? Isn’t that why she can’t face her home again?

You depart for Tevinter together. You don’t manage to find the vial.

** >>**

You start the journey in higher spirits than you anticipated. You are glad for the company, gladder than you expected, though you should know by now how badly you need other people to keep yourself sane. Tabris is wound tight as a coil, nerves and angles and cutting edges, but just her occasional comments about the weather and the way to go and which inn to stay at keep you grounded. She feels familiar, and she feels good. You decide to put aside what you think you know about her. You are glad to have her beside you now.

You begin to think perhaps this might all work out exactly as you wish (though you are an elf, still a target, you think only of your magic) and after all, you are an important person in Ferelden. You begin to dream, to think, to hope, to imagine, that Tevinter will be—

** >>**

It is not.

** >>**

The events that follow in Tevinter, you never speak of again.

** >Go home**

If you hardly ever left your lab before, you disappear into its depths now on a permanent basis.

You can barely stand to be seen. The faint scar around your neck feels like a noose.

You work, but often you cannot work, and when you cannot work you drink until the better part of your awareness is gone dripping down the flagstones. You drink until you can’t remember why you started, until you wake up with a splitting headache and vileness at the back of your throat, so that you can deal with that instead of thinking.

You never did get around to learning healing magic.

You haven’t slept in your bed in weeks. You are like the darkspawn, hiding in your shadowy belowplace. Would sunlight burn you now, how it burns them?

One week you make the mistake of falling asleep at the desk in the Warden-Commander’s office, a bottle of Aqua Magus spilling across an ignored piece of correspondence. You wake to shouting, to Tabris’s ruddy square face demanding to know what is _wrong_ with you, demanding to know whether or not you are _okay,_ and no, of course you aren’t, you’re a mess, you’re a right bloody mess, and she understands why (she was there) and well she will just see about that, she will see exactly to that and there is nothing you can do about it.

And she drags your dazed and bleary body up, and presses water to your lips, and when you have sputtered some of it down she wrestles you into a hot bath. You try to tell her that you can heat the water yourself, but somehow you seem awfully short on mana just now, so she does it all by hand. She washes your hair and scrubs you back, none too gentle (she was never gentle), and when her strong brown hands brush past your newest scars you flinch so violently as to splash a great deal of water on the floor, but you let her, in the end, you let her touch you where she will, and it hurts and it feels like the healing that you never learned.

When the water has gone cold she yanks you out again. You are near catatonic throughout these ministrations, hardly comprehending what is happening. Why all this? Why her? Why you?

The next thing that she orders is from the kitchens a meal, nourishing, not too heavy, some kind of broth with vegetables. You notice for the first time how much weight you have lost, and that explains, at least, how easy a time such a small woman like Tabris is having, manhandling you about.

Before you know it it is over, and she is saying, that you better not do anything like that again, you selfish bastard, because people are relying on you, _she_ is relying on you, and—

You watch her shout at you, glazed, bleary, and you are so tired, you want to sleep, this time in a real bed, and you are so tired of waiting for Morrigan, so tired of waiting and wondering and not understanding where it all went wrong, so you lean forward just a little bit, so that your dry cracked lips are pressed to hers so softly, and if nothing else that keeps her from shouting.

She helps you to bed, real bed, where you can’t bring yourself to let go of her, where you make her promise not to leave, and then you sleep for twenty hours straight.

** >>**

What you and Tabris fall into is both familiar and strange.

Familiar, because you swear you already knew she had that faint white scar along her hip, you swear you knew that sound she makes when you do that thing she likes, you swear you knew the way her blunt nails dig into your scalp, how calm it makes you feel, how easy it is to begin to love her

(again)

and strange because after all you do not know her, not like that, strange because you’ve never seen her soft like this

(of course you haven’t)

never seen her tender, she’s never loved like this

(her love was like a purifying fire)

like a hearth, like home.

You begin to forget  the story you have been telling to yourself, about the great dragon-slaying hero and the epic love he shared with an enigmatic witch, and how that love was sure to prevail in the end. The day to day of your life with Tabris has drowned it out, your boring ordinary life that is the same from day to day, your boring ordinary life that you would not trade for the Golden City itself.

Sometimes you think you simply dreamed that other life, that terrible version of Tabris that haunts the edges of your waking mind, because _your_ Tabris nothing at all like that

(until you see the steel glint in her eye, and you remember what she did to those slavers, what you are sure she would do again in a heartbeat at any that glanced so much as askance at you, and no, it is the same woman, simply a fork in the road of the selfsame forest—)

She holds you close, keeps you bound to this earthly plane this mortal coil, her arms around your middle, and some small part of you breathes out and dares relax, dares forget just what it knows, and so it goes so sweet so good until

** >until**

The Witch of the Wilds is seen again.


	6. Chapter 6

 

#  **VI.**

You don’t even think about going after her. Of course you will go after her. Of course Tabris will come with you, and of course you fail to notice how she feels about it.

By the time you realize and guiltily suggest that perhaps you abandon this quest, perhaps you can simply go back home together and you can put your wondering away, she will not hear of it. She will see this through, for you, because she _— cares_ —for you, very much, and of course it is only natural that you wish to find the witch again, she was your friend, your lover, the mother of your child, the woman who saved your life, so of course it is natural, of course it is  _fine._

You tell her that she saved it, too, your life, your very soul, but she won’t hear it. She won’t hear a word you have to say.

Tabris—she won’t let you call her by her given name, you don’t even know what it is—hates Morrigan for leaving you, but not as much as she hates her for coming back. You are not so sure that she is wrong for it. Sometimes you hate her a little bit yourself.

You have not worn the ring she gave you in some time, but neither have you thrown it away.

You just want to know that she is safe. You want to know about your child. You want to know

** >what could have been**

And in the end you find her, and you stride up those bony stairs, and she is there, looking for all the world exactly the same as she was when she traveled with you during the Blight

(but of course she is not the same, there are stretch marks on her belly and tiredness in her eyes, and a certain shocking calmness about her shoulders, she has found something worth living for and it was _not you_ it was never you)

and your heart breaks to see her shift into a defensive pose when you approach, it shows plain as day upon your young boy’s face, and if she feels anyway at all about _that_ then she certainly does not show it.

You talk. One way or the other it all comes spilling out of you.

You find out you have a son.

You so badly want to see your son.

** >Stay **

You smile at her, and shed your tears, but turn away from that swirl of siren silver. And you tell her that you wish her the best, that you will love her always, but that your paths have diverged, that you have lost her in the forest pathways and perhaps it’s for the best.

She tells you she will not encounter you again. You take her at her word this time, accept it in your heart. You embrace her, once, and then you go, back to where your lover waits, surprised to see you come back to her. You go back to the home that you have built together. One day soon she lets you call her by her given name.

You make a life. You live.

You have won.

** >But did you, really?**

** <<**

** >Step through the portal**

In that moment you forget yourself. You forget everything that you have built, thinking only of the child that has consumed your thoughts for this past year. You are not thinking about love, or promise, or betrayal. You think only of him. As though enchanted, you step through the portal. You have entered the hall of mirrors.

Have you won?

** >>**

Tabris waits for you a while, and is not surprised when you do not return. She goes back to Vigil’s Keep. As your senior Warden, she becomes the new Commander. She falls into the role as rainwater to a mountain lake, and years from the day of your departure she hardly remembers how she got there. If she still loves you, ever loved you, she keeps it to herself, locked tight inside a polished wooden box inside her cold iron lady’s heart.

 ** <<** **< <** **< <** **< <**

You go to Tevinter alone.

** >it is so much worse alone**

But you survive.

** >Go home**

No one barges into your chamber door. No one knows to worry for your health. You drink and you work and go quietly mad.

** >>**

When the Witch of the Wilds is spotted again, you go after her—alone.

And when you find her, you have precious few words for her at all, though you remember through the fog that you may well have loved her once.

But the Witch of the Wilds is shrewd and she espies the change in your bearing, the guarded posture of your body, she sees right away what has happened to you.

** >and she sees that you are dangerous**

She sees at once now what you are, what danger you could pose to her, the monster that you might soon become (might now already be) and if for one moment sorrow and loss for the boy you were and the man you might have been passes through her heart, it does not pass across her face. She shuts. She straightens. She warns you not to follow.

You lunge for her, too late. She has gone through the mirror. You are alone on your knees, your fist against the dark glass, furious, a scream of pure futility tearing through your throat.

** <<**

** >and she sees that you are lost**

And for one moment the prospect of sorrow and loss in her heart shows on her face, and in that moment of weakness she takes the risk—she breaks her iron cage, that of her mother’s and her own making, and rather than wait for you to beg, she asks, she actually _asks_ you to come with her.

You have a son together. You could have a life.

** >Go with her**

You step into her embrace and it is not like coming home, it is hardly even like _making_ a home, she is too strange (like you) too wild (like you) to do anything undignified like that, but nonetheless you step into the portal with her.

You have entered the Hall of Mirrors.

There you rest. You heal. You play with your son. You never learn to be the person you were (were you any kind of person?), but you learn to be another, the one they need. Years later you tolerate Morrigan touching your newest scar and many years after that you allude to your son where it came from. You think perhaps you are happy. You know that you are something very much like content.

You have won?

** >Oh, please**

** <<**

** >Be honest**

Now the fact of the matter is that there is not enough of you left. She waited too long to return. You are raw and bleeding and your guts are spilling on the bones beneath your feet, and you still wish to see the child, but you are yet still sane enough to know that you are no good to him now, no good to Morrigan either, no good to anyone anymore. And you are just sane enough to know it.

You tear yourself away, afraid to burn her with your fever. You turn, you run, you don’t care look back.

** >Return to the Vigil?**

You have just one more chance.

Stop at the inn?

** >Yes, stop and rest a while**

You stop there and you drink and drink and drink until you can hardly remember your name, until you can hardly remember why you are drinking and certainly cannot remember why all your insides feel like they are clawing themselves apart. You are a mage of no mean talent and the trick to keeping yourself conscious and capable of drinking is a mean one indeed.

So you are still there when the crowd has thinned just enough for the hooded assassin to see you.

Zevran pulls back his hood in astonishment, baffled bright at the sight of you.

You are cheered to see him, because you are drunk, unspeakably drunk, so drunk that you nearly remember an entire imagined life with this man, of warm days upon the Antiva docks and calm nights spent together in your chambers—when you know full well you’d only slept with him a couple times before Morrigan’s jealousy ended it for good. You are so drunk you are ready to imagine yourself in love with him, simply because he is a familiar face and he is there, and nobody else has been for a long long time, and Maker, cursed be his name, _Maker_ you are so glad to see him.

You offer to buy him a drink. He offers to take you to bed. It is only when you nearly fall off your chair head-first towards the hardwood floor that you realize he doesn't mean it _that_ way. He catches you, cradles you close, and you are vaguely aware of being carried upstairs, of being deposited somewhere soft and nearly clean, of the blessed peace of it all (you nearly weep), and it is good that you lose consciousness, because otherwise you might have noticed being undressed, and that may have caused you to sober up enough to stop him.

** >>**

When you wake you’ve still got your shirt on, and your pants, and Zevran is dozing in the nearby chair and not in bed with you, which is disappointing, and then terrifying, because the shirt you are wearing does not have a high collar, and that means _he saw_ and that means _he knows_ he might have guessed and you consider briefly the possibility of simply escaping out the window before he wakes up.

Too late. His sleep was as thin as the last spring snow. He is awake now and his golden gaze is quite shrewd, too shrewd.

You make a weak joke about missing him in your bed. He doesn’t seem to find it very funny.

You won’t look at him.

_Maker, my friend, what has happened to you?_

You still won’t look at him.

Well, Zevran is nothing if not persistent. He won’t leave until he has ascertained that you aren’t going to go kill yourself the second he takes his eyes off you, whether by blade or spell or drink. He knows better than to touch you. But he is hovering, clearly a hairsbreadth from seizing you by the shoulders and shaking you into sanity, hoisting you out of whatever it is that you’ve fallen into by sheer force of will alone.

** >Let him**

If he had offered pity you would never have taken it, but what he offers, you realize, is fear _,_ a terrified astonishment at how far you have fallen in so short a time. Has it really only been a year and a half? When you last saw him you were a boy of not-quite-nineteen, bright and laughing at the joy and glory of it all, so certain, so sure, and now you must be twenty, only twenty, but it feels so much longer than that, so long. You must have lived a dozen lifetimes already, and you are heavy with them, choking on them.

(you are sober now, or close to it, and perhaps it is the splitting headache that is making you delirious, that is making you erroneously believe in your fever vision from the night before, of the life you shared with him in Antiva City, that it must have really happened, somewhere, somehow, because you have not thought of Zevran now in many months and yet you want so _badly_ to—)

** >>**

He asks if perhaps you’d like to come with him back to Antiva, where he has business, as long as you are not too busy, of course, and he would not want to impose on your life, but if perhaps you’ve nothing pressing to be getting to he would be terribly comforted if you could come with him (if only for a short while! you look as though you could use some sun, some fresh air!) to help him with his business there, he’d be very grateful, and you know it really had been entirely too long—

** >Yes**

Yes, it would be so easy.

 ** >Yes, ** **_yes_ **

So easy

 ** >Sweet Maker, ** **_yes_ **

** <<**

** >Tell him no**

Are you certain?

** >No**

This is your last chance, you know.

** >You don’t believe that **

But you don’t care.

** <<**

** >Allow him nothing**

** >Tell him no**

Oh, you won’t be made a fool of twice.

** <<**

Stop at the inn?

**** >No, keep going** **

You go on.


	7. Chapter 7

#  **VII.**

You return to the Vigil, because you have nowhere else to go. Your things are here, if nothing else.

And such things they are.

In your journeys you have acquired objects of power, objects of mystery. You own tomes of magic written in the very language of fear. You think, well, if not know, then when?

There in your dark dungeon your experiments grow wilder. You grow less concerned with who sees, who talks, who they talk to.  One by one the strings have severed. Your work is all you have left. You wish to see how far you can go, how deep you can push, how many bounds you can break. Every day you find new ones. Every day you want for more.

Already you are changing. Eventually you can no longer hide it.

In the end you are outed as wretched maleficar.

There is a fight.

** >You lose**

You have died.

And that’s that. But what if—

** <<**

** >You win**

You are just quick enough, just strong enough, to get away—and to take many Wardens with you. Which of them betrayed you, you wonder? A new recruit? Or one of the ones who has been with you since the beginning? Nathaniel? Velanna? Tabris?

Many fall.

You flee.

You know how to make yourself as shadow, as smoke. They search for you, and find you not. Eventually, they stop searching.

You mourn for a time, mourn for your old life, mourn for all that you could have been, all that everyone thought you were.

But not for long.

** >>**

You become the terrifying thing lurking in the forest.

It’s hard to set yourself up anew. All your equipment was back at the Vigil, and even you are not foolhardy enough to risk going back there. But even without your tomes, your cauldrons, your delicate glassware, you have all the growing living things in the forest, and you have your formidable mind, and you have, as always, your blood.

Your experiments continue.

** >>**

** >>**

** >>**

Every once in a while, young heroes come to slay you.

** >Sometimes they succeed**

But most times they don’t.

** <<**

** >Most times you slay them first**

It is not like the last time, when you were a mere footnote in someone else’s story. You are no minor monster to be dispatched along the way to loftier goals.

You are the end of the line. The challenge that cannot be met.

** >>**

** >>**

** >>**

The years go by. You forget many things. You forget what lives you have lived and what lives you have lost. You forget laughter. You forget warmth.

You learn to sustain yourself with only the Blight in your blood. And so you forget food, and you forget water, and all things soft and mortal you forget.

And one day the sky breaks open and demons come pouring out.

You think, yes, you can work with that.

(You scarcely notice when the Calling begins to sing in your veins.)

** >>**

It has been a long time since you have left your forest lair.

You hear vague inklings of something of a Mage-Templar War, and it seems not so much a war to you as a bloody free-for-all. And that is fine by you.

You’ve so badly wanted to hunt these slug-men in their iron shells. For a time you are distracted with just that.

You have learned much in your time alone. Templar’s powers have no effect on you, you who draw your strength from your own blood, your own augmented soul. You always hope to run into somebody you knew in Kinloch, but you never have the luck.

You crush them in their armor (you were six years old the first time you are kicked so hard you couldn’t breathe) you broil them alive (a single whiff of embrium, chief ingredient of magebane, will set you retching) you drown them in their blood (you still have only partial vision in your left eye, after the time you got hit for laughing too loud) you make them into your puppets and have them turn on their friends (you were hiding in the library the time you heard them rape that girl, and then you had to go back there to study the next day and the next one after that)

You think of every crime done unto you, and you do unto in return, again and again and again and

** >again**

You encounter other mages. Bands of refugees, hardly any kind of army, scared and hungry and alone. Well, you’ll take care of their tormentors for them, whether they want you to or not.

Most times they leave you be. But sometimes they turn on you, for proving the Chantry right, for daring to be exactly what you have been told to be since birth.

It hurts, of course it hurts, but you will not retaliate. You are more than capable of disappearing. Very rarely are you forced to hurt them back.

You have long since accepted that the basic mode of people is ingratitude.

** >>**

At the crossroads you turn

** >south**

and there you meet the group of Ferelden mages, few of them familiar. Most of them are Tranquil, being herded along by one of the few people that bothered to think of them. Most of the Tranquil are dead now, you know this. Someone has gone around mounting their skulls on pikes. (You don’t remember what it drove you to do, that sight, but there is a smoking crater where a mountain was before.)

When they spot you they don’t attack on sight, and even if they had it would not have mattered, because you are glancing through the assembled Tranquil’s faces and there is one here that you recognize—

** >Oh, Maker, Jowan**

His flat blank eyes they fall upon you, such strange-familiar eyes out of a strange-familiar face, you have not seen your very best friend (your very first love) for years and years, not since he was lead away from you at Redcliffe (your fault, your fault, you could have and you didn’t, you could have—)

But even those blank eyes are capable of recognition, and yes, he knows you, changed as he is, changed as you are. He _knows_ you.

All at once the past ten years are stripped away and you are a teenage boy drunk on his first taste of freedom realizing a little too late that he is in love with his best friend, watching that friend be taken away, unable to move or act or speak from fear, and you have not known fear for years but now it is back with raw-toothed vengeance.

You can’t let him see you like this. You can’t bear it.

You barely notice when the first offensive spells begin to whiz past your ears.

You break, and run

** >and run and run and **

run until the past ten years are sloughed away, and you are filled with nothing but the burning of your heart and lungs and the long painful stretch of flesh, the buzzing reverberation of bone, all these mortal devices which you have allowed to atrophy.

A single glimpse of him was enough to shatter you, enough to return you from that far country in which you have resided all these years, to one of labored breath and hummingbird heart, and the feel of the dirt under your fingernails and sunshine on your skin. You are on your knees—how far did you run, to get away from that indifferent scrutiny?

What have you been _doing?_

You feel more and less yourself than you have been in years.

And it is in this ocean of memory and feeling, in his labyrinth of mirrors that you are lost within, when the little band of Templars looking for a vulnerable mage alone manages to find you.

You have died.

** <<**

** >>**

At the crossroad you turn

** >north**

and you encounter no one along the road save a caravan of refugees. The flee in terror at the sight of you. You let them, this time.

** >>**

Eventually you tire of slaying Templars, strange as that may feel. They are mere men, and you have grown beyond that now. You set your sights higher.

It takes some doing, some seeking, some worming, but eventually you find out who it is that caused these rifts, that shattered the heavens and drew you out of hiding.

An ancient darkspawn magister. A priest of silence.

You are a Warden, and the Blight flows in your veins. The darkspawn are your kin. The Architect understood that, but the Architect is gone.

You seek him out. How could you not?

You learn much. You see much. You contemplate his vision. To break apart the veil and storm again the Black City, to take back the Maker’s throne?

Yes, you can work with that. And with this red lyrium, too.

** >>**

_Choice_ spirit, the demon says irritably. I’m a _Choice_ spirit.

You laugh yourself sick. Since when does anyone get to define who they are? Since when does anyone get a choice?

You are what you are. You do as you do. There aren’t any choices, not really.

The demon slyly grins and asks if you are sure.

And he offers you a choice.

This way, or that. Or that. Or this one, or this other one. So many paths, offered to you at every instance of time, yours for the taking, if only you might choose.

(for an instant you see into Imshael’s demesne, into the labyrinth of winding possibility, into the hall of mirrors—)

Of course the demon is no match for you. You slay him where he stands. No choices anymore.

** >>**

Now you are truly a monster.

You are more powerful now than you have ever been before. Such it is that comes of throwing in your lot with a darkspawn magister. You are drunk on crimson lyrium and on heady dreams of the future when it will all be different, a future you will have a hand in forging.

When you discover this fledgling Inquisition, you can hardly contain your hatred. An _Inquisition._ Claiming to stand for all that is right and true. You think back to every sanctimony, every orange-clad sister that ever told a five year old boy that he was already a monster (well, wouldn’t they be satisfied now), every mage you ever saw tortured to death in the prison-tower where you were kept like a dangerous beast.

 _Well, they were right!_ Your sick vermillion magic drains ten men of their lives, and returns them to mortal coil as your shambling servants. They were right! They were right!

(You have never denied the thing you are, and if it took this long for you to look it, well)

You wreak havoc all across the countryside in a swathe so wide it stalls the imagination, tempting this Inquisition to come to you. The notion of destroying this ugly farce of an organization, singlehanded, appeals to you, and you think you just might be able to manage it. You lead them on a merry chase, bleeding them of men and materiel, daring them to try just a little harder.

They do catch up to you eventually.

** >You lose**

You managed to take out quite a lot of them. Half the Inquisitor’s inner circle lies dead by your hand. It wasn’t even _hard._

But you did lose, eventually.

You have been thrown into a dungeon in a castle in the sky, and the irony is almost too much for you. Sigils swarm around the stone walls, keeping you from working any magic. You remember the last time you were thrown in such a cell. You are only glad not to be that boy anymore.

The idleness does not bother you. You expected to be killed, and are not so sure what to do with yourself while you are still alive. You have checked and re-checked the bars upon your cage, and they are quite unbreakable. Whoever wrought them knew magic well, knew it in the old way.

Sometimes you are visited by the Inquisitor, who wants to know why it was that you did what you did, what drove you to it

** >The Inquisitor, who looks so terribly familiar—**

The Inquisitor’s face is a watery blur, halfway resolved—who are they? You know them...you’ve met them before. The memory strikes you like lightning on a clear blue day.

You remember.

You had no idea—if you’d known, you would never have—

** >But that’s not how it happened, was it?**

** <<** **< <          ** **< <          ** **< <          ** **< <**

 ** <<** **< <          ** **< <** **< <**

 ** <<** **< <** **< <**

 ** <<          ** **< <**

** <<**


	8. Chapter 8

#  **VIII.**

You return to the Vigil, because you have nowhere else to go. You do your duty, because you have nothing else to do.

For a time. You pursue your research, but the joy of it has gone. And so you never grow so brazen as to be betrayed. Though what you are is something of an open secret, you are too tired to transgress. Your mind can barely string a half a thought together. Your equipment accrues a fine layer of dust.

But always you still answer Avernus’s letters.

When you leave your post as Warden-Commander to follow a lead that might lead you to a cure to the Blight itself, it is on good terms. In your post you appoint Warden-Lieutenant Tabris (who is nothing to you, beyond a loyal Warden and friend, who was never anything like _that_ to you).

This honor, this title, it was always meant for her, not you. By what strange accident of fate you came by it, now you release it. You turn your back on the Vigil and go in search for answers, for some sense made of your strange and winding life.

Your travels take you far and wide. You are a wandering fire, seeking knowledge, seeking truth, and yes, you are alone, but it is not so hard these days to be alone. You are older now. You have learned how to be alone. There are worse fates than a worthy life alone.

(Some nights you lie half-dreaming of shadowy worlds where you meet these fates.)

Even to that you grow accustomed. 

** >>**

You hear scraps of news of this and that. You hear tell that a mad mage blew up the Kirkwall Chantry. You hear tell the mage was a Grey Warden, that he was possessed, an abomination. You hear the stirrings of a revolution, of the mages rising up.

A marrow-deep and furious part of you wants to wheel around, turn back, rise up with all the others. Would you not make a worthy ally in the fight? You with all your might, could you not turn the tide? 

But you know better now. You know to be afraid of all that you can be.

And these days your aloneness is a comforting companion.

You hold your course to the distant West.

** >>**

You are nearly beyond reach when reached you are. A letter comes on dark wings. You recognize Leliana’s hand, imagine her hand tracing upon this parchment. This fledgling Inquisition asks your aid.

The letter is sealed with the Chantry sunburst, the same sunburst burned into the foreheads of all the mages deemed too dangerous,the same sunburst that hung above you in judgement for the heavy years of your youth. The sunburst, and the eye-that-judges, and the sword-that-strikes.

** >Tell them no**

You crumple the letter in a travel-roughened fist. It burns to cinders at your touch. How dare they? How _dare_ she?

You go on West, to your final destination and your ultimate fate.

Of that fate we shall speak later.

** <<**

** >Tell them yes**

For an old friend, you will do this, though a name like  _Inquisition_ turns your stomach.

You turn around. You cross desert and mountain, hill and dale and darkness, until you are back in your own familiar country, in a land that only seemed wild in distant childhood memory.

You approach this fortress called Skyhold, this high cold place of holiness and stone. A mage is fire made flesh, and you have not felt cold in many years, but the sight of it still chills you to the bone.

But you did promise.

You ride through the gates, are greeted with hushed awe, with wonder. Your flesh is fire, but it is song and legend also.

Leliana is there to greet you. She is colder, sharper, ten years older (you suppose that you are, too), and her embrace like her smile are just on the near side of brittle.

It is  then that you lay your eyes upon this Inquisitor that you have heard so much about—and the Inquisitor is

** >a very old friend**

Jowan smiles at you. His eyes crinkle. His forehead furrows over the Tranquil brand. Yet here he is, smiling.

You fall to your knees. You don’t waste breath on asking how.

He grasps you gently by the forearms, lifts you, and you have never held so tightly.

He tells you, as you walk in the garden, of all that had transpired since your parting. Of how he was made Tranquil back at Kinloch, and the long years of his shadow-servitude. Of the rebellion, of the resulting chaos. How he was shunted from band to band, of the constant peril, of how many of his fellow Tranquil he saw killed before he found himself in service at the Conclave. Of how he chanced to pick up a particular artifact, and what it did to him.

It was in the Fade that he found himself again.

He tells you about the Fade, about the things he saw there. About how when he returned, he was a mage again. Laughingly, he shows you, conjuring a tiny bolt of lightning. The Fade is with him always, now, and it will never be taken away. 

All this time you cannot tear your eyes away from his face. He’s wearing a scruffy beard, now, and none of the childhood softness remains in his features. Is that how you look to him? Aged and creased and cragged, though you are not yet thirty?

You can’t imagine that any Maker you could understand would have granted this. And yet. And yet, and yet, and yet.

You ask if he could ever forgive you. He doesn’t see what there is to forgive.

From that moment you do not leave him again. It all comes out, eventually, the truth. The feelings you didn’t understand before. It’s all familiar and strange, at once difficult and effortless.

You stay with him until the job is done, and after that, he stays with you.

He takes your hand.

You have won.

** >But that wasn’t it, was it?**

Yes it was! It was it was _it was_

** >It wasn’t**

** <<**

So that’s how it’s going to be, then, is it?

** >The Inquisitor is**

a human woman, tall and regal, some say she’s the spitting image of Andraste but you see nothing holy in her hungry golden eyes—

** >The Inquisitor is**

an casteless dwarven man, they say he was poisoned with lyrium in his youth, they say that is what has birthed his paranoia—

** >The Inquisitor is**

a Tal Vashoth, her shadow long, her broadsword bright, they call her monster-savior both—

** >The Inquisitor is**

An elf, a dwarf—a qunari, a human—a man, a woman, neither—they are of a hundred forms and faces. Before your eyes you watch them grow taller, shorter, broader, thinner,

Skyhold is giving you a headache.

You do not stay long.

** <<**

** >No—you’re really sure this time, the Inquisitor is called**

** >Lavellan**

Inquisitor Lavellan is a waifish Dalish mage. She looks as though a stiff wind would snap her at the waist, as though the Mark has drained her of all vitality.

But you are not fooled. This is the most powerful woman in Thedas. You do not trust her Inquisition.

She greets you in a most deocorous manner, mouths all the appropriate pleasantries. You mouth them back, and all the while you are watching.

Inquisitor Lavellan is surrounded at every hour of the day by her chattering advisors, suggesting she send troops _here,_  recall the spy from _there,_ perhaps she ought attend the diplomatic congress _here._ Your counsel, too, she welcomes, defers gracefully to experience, grants acquiesce to all requests.

Is she a perfect diplomat, or a perfect doormat? The longer you look, the emptier the act becomes. Inquisitor Lavellan, a woman of caution, rarely speaks and always listens—or so it seems.

** >>**

Lavellan is tall, for an elf. He is beautiful, in his harsh way; what more, he knows how to use beauty. His eyes are hawk-sharp. They scrutinize.

You have heard tell that the Inquisitor, for all his mythology, is an illiterate savage, a stubborn ass of a man who would not know politics if it bit him on the nose. You have heard tell that he is manipulated utterly by his advisors, that the real power behind the Inquisition is, oh, all sorts of types. The spymaster. The throne. The heretic Right Hand of the deceased Divine.

But you are not fooled. This is the most powerful man in Thedas. You do not trust his Inquisition.

The first thing he says to you is: I thought you’d be taller.

The first thing you say to him is: well, I thought you’d be handsomer. His lips quirk, briefly.

Inquisitor Lavellan is surrounded at every hour of every day by his gently despairing advisors, desperate to sway him to one course of action or another. He is obstinate, pigheaded, and behaves with no apparent rhyme or reason. Gradually, you realize he is doing it on purpose.

He has somehow convinced his staff that he can neither read nor write. You are yet unsure if this is a way avoid paperwork, or a clever ploy to get his enemies to underestimate him. You suspect it may be both.

Inquisitor Lavellan, man of action, rarely speaks and never listens—or so it seems.

** >>          **

The Inquisition gathers its forces to march on Adamant. You wander Skyhold, eyes open, ears sharp as they are long. You are delighted to encounter the dwarven Arcanist you helped all those years ago; you make fast friends with the elven spirit mage, listen delightedly to his endless stories; you become especially fond of Compassion, although you can rarely stand to be around him long. You do not trust this Inquisition, but you can’t say that you hate it, either.

In the evenings you walk the garden and the ramparts with Her Inquisitorial Grace, and you speak of anything but business.

What you fall into with Inquisitor Lavellan is easy and thoughtless. It carries no expectations. Gradually you feel the layers of pretense and protection fall away from your skin until you are little but a disembodied mind, perfectly at peace, perfectly at ease.

You think of how alone she is here, here in these high stone walls, not at all like her forest home. You think of all these Chantry people and all of their advice. You think of the glowing mark on her left hand (a shackle around her wrist). And something takes root in your long-dormant heart, something warm that wants.

Sometimes you nearly speak it aloud, but always you think better of it.

** >>**

The Inquisition gathers its forces to march on Adamant. Inquisitor Lavellan asks you to join him on a select few missions. You spend a few weeks crouched in the rain and dirt with him, spying on enemy agents, storming fortresses, claiming them in the name of the glorious Inquisition. You don’t care for the unfurling banner of that judging eye, but you don’t regret the time spent with Lavellan.

Lavellan is...difficult, ridiculous, enigmatic. His manner is imperious to a fault—rare in an elf, and somehow heartening. Everyone does what he says, and he knows it, and loves it. You love it, too.

You don’t understand him at all, but you don’t understand _anyone_ at all, and being around him makes it feel like that’s alright.

You end up sleeping with him. You end up sleeping with him twice. You end up sleeping with him every night and many mornings. You end up moving your things into his chambers.

What you fall into with Inquisitor Lavellan is easy and thoughtless. One night he traces the lattice of your many scars (you tense at first), the old ones along your back and the newer ones earned in battle, and he is wise enough not to touch the one around your neck. Inquisitor Lavellan has few if any scars. Instead he has his a delicate tracery of vallaslin sitting darkly upon smooth brown skin. He is a work of art, your powerful new lover, lithe and strong and all that you are not.

He tells you, if you had been born Dalish, you would have vallaslin, too. If you had been born Dalish, you would have been a treasured, precious keystone of the clan. You would surely have been First, and someday, Keeper. You would have been beloved.

You don’t know why he tells you such things. You wish he’d stop.

** >>**

You speak often with Solas, when he isn’t asleep. Solas is often asleep. When he is awake he claims it is because he is walking in the Fade, searching for answers. You half-wish you could have thought of that first—you’ve certainly had years you wish you could have slept through. The Fade is not so easy for a blood mage to traverse (though your sleep is not yet dreamless.)

You circle him more than anyone else in Skyhold, save for Lavellan (with Lavellan it is—different). Neither Dalish nor city elf—like you. A mage—like you. A strange and far-eyed man—like you.

** >>          **

You have more than half a thought that Solas is in love with Inquisitor Lavellan. You don’t know if she knows. You find excuses not to ask. You understand that you are jealous, but—of who?

** >>**

You feel Lavellan’s admiration for him, the way he looks to Solas as to a Keeper. You know of nobody else in Skyhold, of nobody else at all, who can command the slightest drop of deference from the Inquisitor the way that Solas can.

In this you have your first hint that Lavellan, perched on all his power, might ever not know what to do.

 

** >>          **

Lavellan tells you about the brother she had once, sent to protect her at the Conclave, dead by her unwitting choice, if not her hand. She lets slip in an unguarded moment isn’t sure that his sacrifice was worth it. In a moment less guarded still, that she is certain it was not.

You ask about him. No, she says, she couldn’t possibly—but then it all comes spilling out, his quirks, his manner, his awkward childhood anecdotes. Over the telling she smiles more, laughs more, than in all the time you’ve known her. She loved her brother.

You loved him, too, in some other place, some other world, in some vast and dreadfully important way, but he is gone, all you have is her. In some dark moments you are filled with blistering resentment—in others, a desperate misdirected love.

But most times Lavellan is simply your dear friend, and surely you do love her, and that cannot be her problem now.

** >>**

Once in an unguarded moment Lavellan tells you of the sister he once had, the Clan's intended spy who he'd been tasked with protecting, who he had the gall to dare outlive.

He says no more of her. Even the words he spoke came slow and halting, the speaking of her existence near unbearable. You won’t bring her up again. But though she is dead, you know her face, her voice—and though your lover is alive and here with you in peace and warmth, you cling as though you are all that keeps him from his fate-determined death.

You are so tired of these fragile things.

**> >**

And in this manner it continues until you find yourself obliged to attend the ball at Halamshiral, which you don’t want, which you can’t escape

**> >**

and at this ball you chance to see the mother of your child, _here,_ against all odds, as though to haunt you **—**

**> >**

You drink until you can't recall your name.

** >>**

Lavellan finds you on the balcony after it’s all over. You hardly notice him until he’s right behind you, his warm palm on your shoulder.

He asks you for a dance. You let yourself be pulled into an embrace and sway with him for a while on that starlit balcony. You think you might have heard him whisper something in your ear, just before you pass out drooling on his shoulder, but in the morning you can no longer quite recall what it was.

**> >          **

You find Lavellan on the balcony after it’s all over. You can barely keep yourself upright, and most of you has been flushed away with all the wine, so that is how you find yourself stumbling in her direction, putting your hand on her waist, asking her for a dance.

You don’t remember her accepting, but you do remember dancing. You don’t remember what you slurred into her ear, and she never brings it up.

**> >**

Morrigan is staying at Skyhold now. Has she changed at all? She looks the same. There is a boy with her who looks nothing like you.

**> >**

When it comes time to march on Adamant, you have never been so relieved to get away (save for, perhaps, just once.) If Lavellan notices, you do not discuss it. There is business to be conducted.

**> >**

It ought to hurt, seeing your Wardens turn on you like this, and maybe it does, a little. But a part of you remembers how they turned on you before. A part of you finds it all too easy to kill them all.

**> Fall**

You fall into the Fade, surrounded on all sides by fractured images of all that

was                              is                              shall be

All in some glum way, unsurprising.

The nightmare shows you your greatest fear. He has your face.

**> Sacrifice yourself?**

You aren’t especially the type.

**> Surface**

** >>**

You wake the Inquisitor Lavellan shouting orders, arranging fates. He has fallen from the Fade once more, and nothing in his posture belies the least discomfort. He is the picture of control.

Once he is finished shouting, he hauls you up and sternly tells you to never, ever, ever even _suggest_ you might do something so reckless ever again, and you grin and make no promises, and he kisses you long and hard for everyone to see, but you can’t enjoy it much—in his eyes was unrelenting terror, fear deeper than any you have seen before.

**> >          **

You wake to hushed silence, absolute awe. Inquisitor Lavellan has fallen from the Fade again. You offer her a hand, a curious glance, but this she ignores to stand on her own. The she turns to decide the fate of thousands.

You watch her in bemused fascination. Her eyes held not a drop of fear in them. Her eyes held nothing whatsoever.

**> >**

Your purpose with the Inquisition now complete, there is no further reason for you to stay. You had aborted business in the West. This Chant-infested detour in your life is now ending.

What will you do?

**> >          **

Lavellan does not ask you to remain. When you bring up needing to go, she politely asks when you will be leaving.

Who is she? You still don’t know. All these hours, all these months, spent in her company, and you have no idea. You see the masks, you see its cracks, but what lies beneath you do not begin to comprehend.

You never were much good at reading people.

That you manage to see that quiet desperation in her eyes is half a miracle itself.

You look at her on the ramparts so thin and cold, the tips of her ears red and frozen by the wind, the swirling vallaslin not-quite-disguising the faint lines of exhaustion.

Not yet, you tell her. Not yet.

** >>**

Lavellan asks you to stay. From him it sounds half a command. If it _were_ a command, you might be tempted to refuse.

You think about his strong hands and warm breath and the stubborn miracle that is his whole existence. You shove it all away—the work is more important. The work may save the lives of thousands. The work can’t be done by anyone but you.

His face is blank, impassive. He speaks little, shows less, your enigmatic lover who you do not understand, who does not understand you back.

It is cold up on the battlements, but somehow you cease to notice. You promise to remain.

**> >**

You do not notice the beauty of the Temple. There is too much on your mind.

Morrigan is here—and Maker, you still love her, you never stopped. You never stopped loving anybody in your life. But that doesn’t matter now. What matters is the Well of Sorrows.

You listen to the argument stretch on and on—who should drink? Morrigan? Solas? Lavellan?—and the longer you listen the less you hear.

The truth about you (this you know) is that you have not changed. You are what you are. You are what you have always been.

You are magic. You are power. You are the endless quest for knowledge. You are that which would destroy itself.

You dive into the water.

** >>**

Lavellan’s protests come too late

**> >          **

Lavellan does not protest at all

**> >**

You fall through the water, as you fell through the Fade

In the water you taste secrets. You touch whispers. You are words and you are thoughts and you are nothing and no one and you are everything and all.

You sink deeper—rise faster—you are crushed—you expand—

You wake in an empty basin, your clothes dry, Lavellan’s hands on your pulse point.

** >>**

He carries you out of the temple

**> >          **

She slings your arm around her bony shoulders and lets you walk

**> You have lived**

You suck it up and talk to Morrigan.

She’s missed you. You ignore that. She wants to know about the Well, how it feels. You ignore that, too.

You ask to see your son.

His eyes see far and deep. They are not your eyes. They are not his mother’s, either.

He tells you lyrium gives him nightmares. It gives you nightmares, too, but you don’t mind them. Maybe one day he won’t mind them, either.

He tells you he’s dreamed of you. You’ve dreamed of him, too.

(In another world he was your son. In this one, he is just a boy you helped create. It does not matter that some lateral-you remembers raising him for these past ten years, of watching him grow, of helping him do it. It does not even matter that you half-suspect that he remembers, too.)

You don’t get to talk to him long before Morrigan decides that you’ve had long enough.

You’ll remember the way he smiled.

**> >**

After that final battle, you are out of excuses.

You have a final talk with Morrigan. These months at Skyhold have been nigh-unbearable, but all your anxious resentment, all your terrified animosity, dissipates as a morning fog beneath the truth—that she is just a woman, and you are only a man, and you have known each other for quite a long time.

Do you remember, she asks, the time Alistair walked in on us, but we were both giant spiders?

And that’s it. You laugh, and you remember.

You look upon her now and only now you realize what children you had been those years ago. You knew that you yourself were only a boy, but you had thought her already grown, a woman seasoned, your better and your greater. Now you wonder--was she as afraid of you as you had been of her?

You kiss her cheek in a final farewell. She departs within the hour. Were it not for Mythal crouched upon your soul, you might have thought to go with them.

(You close your eyes and you can almost see it, how you might have been a part of that family. But that reflection is not you. With this you make your peace.)

**> >          **

You stay with Lavellan for a time after that. Solas disappears. She accepts it the way she accepts everything—as ripples on a frozen mountain lake

You stay because you remain foolishly convinced that she needs you, or wants you, because you remain foolishly attached to this distant woman who is not quite what you want, who is everything you need.

You look into Lavellan as you might look into a mirror, and the longer you look, the less you see. You reach and scrabble and grasp for something behind her brittle smile and tired eyes, but you never find it, and you realize one day it is because there is nothing there.

Because she, like you, has no idea how to be a person. Whoever she once was, the Inquisition took it, scooped it out, subjected what was left to the heat and pressure of command. All this time you longed to find the woman who was lost, but she is gone, there is nothing left for you to find.

(Lavellan may have forgotten, but did you ever know at all?)

In the end, nothing comes of it. You can never pin down exactly why. But you, and all the people (you believe) you’re serving, can no longer afford it.

There is work to be done.

You promise her nothing, out of respect

You leave her standing on the battlements, furious with you and not knowing why. When you look back she is already gone.

** >>**

You stay with Lavellan for a time after that. Solas disappears. It incenses him, but lots of things incense him.

You realize in some mundane moment or another how deeply that you love and are loved in return. The love you have grown in Skyhold is so unlike any that came before, that you almost do not recognize it. You have known heartbreak, you have known pain, you have known passion that would topple empires, but you have never known this.

What you have grew long and quiet. What you have is as common as dirt, as precious as gold.

You choose him. You choose peace.

For a time.

There is still work to be done.

You leave most of your things with him, most of the life you built together, and promise to return.

He watches you until you disappear behind the horizon, but you do not look back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The male Lavellan featured in chapters 8 and 9 is the same one featured in [Poor Communication Kills.](https://archiveofourown.org/series/425029) He has a dead sister in that continuity, too.


	9. Chapter 9

#  **IX.**

You leave the Inquisition behind—sooner, or later—or perhaps you never taried, never met an Inquisitor, never met your son.

Someway or another you always end up here, deep into the west, beyond any charted lands. You have chased this lead through five countries and a dozen narrow escapes. You have killed for it, allowed others to die for it. But if (if) you are right about what lies there, thousands more may be saved (sometimes you as much as half-believe this.)

You seek the cure for the Blight.

** >Did you go alone?**

It ends up not much mattering.

** >>**

You never were careful enough. You wanted it too badly. You are what you are. You want what you want.

You wanted the truth more than you wanted to be whole. (You don’t know what it means to be whole.)

You wanted the truth more than you cared to be cautious.

The next thing you know you are less an arm and a leg and an eye and your potent Blight-ridden blood is swiftly abandoning your body.

You are dying, but you are not yet dead.

** >Hold on—wait—you have to think about this first—**

You have died.

** <<**

** >Reach**

You call upon the Fade. You are what you are and what you are is a mage and a mage is fire made flesh and a mage is a sea of the raw stuff of creation.

You meant to call up a little spirit of healing and renewal, but in that moment you are weak and bleeding. Your animal body is panicking. It only wants to live. It doesn’t care about your soul.

What you summon is neither little nor healing nor a spirit

** >Resist**

You have died.

** <<**

** >Accept**

The presence fills you as light fills a room, as water fills a vessel.

You forget selfness. You forget separateness. It is not darkness that you are banished to, but neither is it light.

** >and the demon’s name was HUBRIS**

** >>**

** >>**

** >>**

Now you are truly a monster. Who will love you now?

** >Who did you leave behind?**

** >Morrigan**

Morrigan knows better than to let you speak.

It is no easy battle. You are a power rarely known unto this world, and the demon Hubris has become you. It lasts three days and destroys three towns and most of a city.

But Morrigan, like you a mage of no mean talent, has something to protect. In the end she will slay you.

She will mourn, afterwards, and she will tell the son you had together the whole unvarnished truth—that his father left him for reasons he thought worthy, that he fell to corruption, and that he had to be stopped. She will believe it the wisest way, and if she lies awake some nights wondering if she might have been wrong, she does not lie too long.

You have died.

** <<**

** >Tabris**

Tabris is quick and clever. She wields no magic, but neither is she blind. She has watched and understood.

By the time you-and-the-demon have awoken she has drawn a binding circle. Tabris, who always envied you your magic, who never needed it.

She tells demon Hubris that it better bargain if it ever wanted out.

The demon threatens your life. She scoffs—she knows it wants you for your mortal form. The demon threatens your body. She calls the bluff—what squatter would wreck it own home? Go ahead, she says. See how far it gets you. The demon threatens your soul. She laughs in its face. As though any demon could outmatch a soul like _yours_ in single combat.

You always knew Tabris would do what must be done. You always knew that her depths of darkness were as great as her heights of light. Tabris is power. Tabris is _will._

In the end she does succeed. The demon gives you back control, in exchange for freedom. You reassert your will in your own mangled body, raw Fade-stuff in place of flesh-bone-blood. The demon crouches in you, still there but now quiescent, tamed.

Tabris has won. She binds your wounds and gives you comfort.

But after, you can’t look at her, not without seeing a woman prepared to let you be destroyed to win a test of will, and neither can she look at you without knowing that same truth about herself. You cling together for a time, but only a time. One morning you find her gone, and are not sorry for it.

You are left not quite alone.

** <<**

**> Lavellan**

What keeps you sane, what lets you keep control, is the thought that there is someone waiting for you. You wake far from where you lost yourself, blurred around the edges. You have an arm and leg and eye made not of flesh-blood-bone but Fade-stuff. You are now at most half a man.

But you have someone to come home to.

**> Go home**

You arrive at the Exalted Council just as it is set to begin. You know better than to question the great serendipity of your timing. You wear tall boots and long gloves. Less an arm and a leg, with no one the wiser. You are only lucky that you heard of this Exalted Council in time to arrive.

You catch sight of Lavellan.

** >It has been over a year since you left him**

In the time it takes for him to cross the courtyard to you, you have time enough to think that he looks rather tired, and before you manage to speak a single word his arms are around you, tight enough to hurt. Excuses verge on spilling from your lips, but before they have a chance there is nothing on your lips but him, one of his hands at the small of your back, the other at your nape, bending under his gladness and relief.

When he finally pulls back you have half-forgotten all your excuses. You open your mouth to speak the truth, but wilt under the bright (or is it feverish?) power of his gaze.

He asks to marry you. He asks to marry you _right now._ What can you say but yes? You marry him that very night, too heavy with the guilt of lies to wonder at the rush.

** >It won’t be until much later that you realize he is dying**

The mark is taking over him. It’s sickly greenish veins extend past his hand, most of the way up his arm, and have begun to colonize his shoulder. All your lore is useless here. The only man who might have helped him is now gone.

Lavellan has already resigned himself to die. Hence your hasty union—the only way to be certain of the proper legal transfer of his wealth and power. He has no one else but you.

You would be furious if you were not so desperately afraid.

You wanted to tell him what happened to you, how this _you_ is not quite the _you_ that left him, but watching him slump under the mounting pain, exhaustion—how could you? Even you are not so cruel.

You, with all your arts, resolve to save him

** >You fail**

It ends up not much mattering

** >>**

You follow him through murder and intrigue, and there is nothing you can do. You watch him weaken, stumble, suffer, bend under the weight of the finality and pain. Lavellan, who stood so tall. Lavellan the obstinate, Lavellan the indomitable, Lavellan the unrefusable. Reality itself bent beneath his will, but now reality has bent him back.

He disappears into the mirror. It seals the way behind him. You are left on your knees, cursing the man who left you widower.

** >Or nearly so**

In the end he lives. You don’t know who or what permitted it.

It’s a long and bloody week before he manages so much as a coherent word. You spend that week in a chair by the bed coming up with yet-more-elaborate excuses for why no, you can’t take off your gloves. Nearly no one in the crumbling Inquisition likes or trusts you, you the open, flagrant blood mage who somehow ensnared their noble Herald. It is an open secret that you must have turned his mind to your own nefarious devices. Were it not for their fear, you would never have been allowed so close to him.

As it is, yours is the first face he sees on waking.

** >>**

You are among the first to hear the truth about Solas.

Lavellan can’t be convinced to stay in bed. I’ve been abed too long, he growls, and rises unsteady, pacing the room like a dragon in a cage. You feel the blistering resentment rolling off of him in waves—how dare Solas, how _dare_ he? That wretch, that villain, that _monster_ (you flinch at the word), Lavellan will strangle the worm himself, Lavellan will squeeze the life from him with his one remaining hand—

You sit and watch and contemplate what Lavellan has told you of Solas's plan. A germ of a thought brews in your heart, wondering whether Solas might not have the right idea. A world of wondrous magic, of total freedom, of no more walls or boundaries. You might find a place for yourself, in a world like that.

Lavellan turns mid-pace. Why are you so quiet? What have you to say?

** >Answer falsely**

You tell him he is not recovered. You tell him he ought to rest.

He grows still and silent. Then he asks why you are still in gloves, and what happened to your eye, and why you were really gone so long.

 ** >If he had ** **_demanded,_ ** **you might simply have refused**

He looks upon you as a stranger, and you are. For what has changed about you is more than bone and blood; you now have another crouching upon your soul. So you cannot speak that second lie of _it’s still me._

Instead you can only say that you love him still, and that you would understand, if he felt otherwise. (Understand, but not forgive.)

** >>**

It isn’t easy. You were gone so long, and came back so changed. You are both of you so difficult. You remember other pathways, other lovers, and with them you never had to work so hard. Now upon this precipice you have the chance to break, to cut your losses now, else risk it rotting. Should you still try?  Is it still worth it?

** >Of course it is of course of course of**

** >>**

It’s almost as though you have to get to know each other over again from the start. You are different, as is he. And you have never fit together easily, but perhaps no two people ever have.

Maybe you don’t need to fit. Maybe you only have to choose.

** >There is always a choice**

If you had entertained wild notions of the Dread Wolf’s plan, they fade away too soon to matter. You had begun to build something, and then you nearly broke it when you left. You have a chance to build it back. It is not a chance that you will waste.

** >>**

Lavellan dissolves the Inquisition, and leaves it all behind. Everything that so long defined him—gone.

Now there is only you.

He refuses all prosthesis, all assistance. You think that he is wallowing. Here you are, no leg, no arm, no eye, and you’ve managed to cope. Well, _you’re_ possessed, he points out, and that’s true enough, but no excuse.

For your part, you’ve grown somewhat absent-minded. Between your childhood injury, the Calling’s gentle hum, Mythal’s Well of Sorrows, and Hubris without whom you would be dead, you have precious little of your own mind left to yourself. You think, without Lavellan, you might have nothing left at all. But you have no need to make do without him, and he has no need to make do without you.

With him, you don't remember your old self, but you grow anew.

** >>**

You go with him to see his clan, though you are afraid. What will they say, about the way you are, about what you have become?

If you had been born in Clan Lavellan, you would have been treasured. You would have been First, and someday, Keeper. You would have been beloved. Could you still be?

Clan Lavellan does not ask, out of politeness. Clan Lavellan’s children have no such compunctions and wish to know why parts of you are green. You tell them you have a spirit friend that helps you walk, which seems to be good enough.

It is a time of calm and peace, that you know better than to expect will last. But even you cannot know what lies beyond, so for now, you sit among forest bough and aravel, with the man you married, with your clan-by-marriage.

This was not something you expected, nor anything you’ll question.

** >But are you really the lying type?**

You could be! For him, you could be! Isn’t that worth it? Isn’t _anything_ worth it?

** >Go back**

** <<**

Lavellan turns mid-pace. Why are you so quiet? What have you to say?

** >Now answer truly**

You can’t help yourself. He asked, he _demanded,_ and so you tell him what you truly think.

How can he be sure that what Solas wants is truly evil?

And he—cannot— _believe_ that you would dare say such a thing.

You argue. It doesn’t matter how many times you say you don’t want to fight, not right now when he’s so—

When he’s so _what,_ he wants to know? Do you think that he is weak now? Do you think him less a man?

You’ve had your arguments before, bad ones, even, but before he was a man of utmost self-possession. Now his Inquisition has rotted from within, his power base has crumbled, and he will never use a bow again. Lavellan is more than half-unhinged.

You didn’t want to talk about this now, but he _insisted._

And when he finds out what you’ve done to yourself, that you are not the man who left him at midsummer—this is the straw that breaks his back.

(Inside you, Hubris roars.)

You take your leave of him before you do or say something you won’t find a way to live with.

And once again you are alone.

** >Are you?**

No, not quite alone. Hubris, your uneasy cohabitant, your undetermined ally, is with you still—and will be with you always, from now on. You are not sure where you end and where it—he? they?—begins, save that there _is_ a place where it-he-they begins, and therefore a place where you must end.

Yes, you and Hubris, you are not quite the same. So there must be some _you_ there still at all.

Perhaps this is allowed.

** >What will we do?**

That is the question, is it not? All you had thought of in this time was your drive to get back to Lavellan, to resume something you so foolishly abandoned. You wanted to go home. You had reason to believe you had one.

** >Go back?**

You aren’t so sure you can. You aren’t so sure you want to.

** >Then go forward**

If he cannot love you as you are—you will not force him. You will weep and you will mourn but you will live, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. There was perhaps a time you would have bent and broken for approval, but you are older, better, now. You contain infinities. You will not beg for dregs.

You go to seek the Dread Wolf.

** >>**

** <<** **< <** **< <** **< <** **< <**

** >>    **

  **> It has been over a year since you left her**

Lavellan greets you with a golden smile and an embrace. You realize at that moment that she expected to never see you again, and you feel yourself a monster for ever letting her believe so.

And why, after all, _did_ you return? Lavellan is your friend, but you have many friends. So as her grey-brown eyes settle on your mangled (and well-hidden) body, she smiles longer than you ever thought her capable, and holds you longer and tighter than ever dared you hope.

It is almost exactly like before. But she is changed as much as you. Before she had a brittle hardness to her. Before she was ever on a precipice.

Now she is at peace within and without. She is dying, and she does not care.

** >It is in the process of her dying that you realize, as usual too late—          **

It ends up not much mattering.

** >>          **

By the time you manage to see her, it has been nearly a week. You are not a man who inspires trust, and Lavellan is as ever surrounded by a dense crowd of advisors, petitioners, worshippers, all parading through her chambers to impart their well-wishes and their gifts and hopes. If it were not for your aura of mild but ever-present menace, you might never have gotten through.

She is dressed and sitting by the window, wan. She seems, if anything, disappointed to have survived, to have failed to be a martyr. Perhaps to her it would have been freedom. After all, what has she left to her? Her brother is long dead. Her clan is slaughtered. Any she might have been close to are poisoned with the sunburst and the sword and the ever-present judging eye.

You, you realize. She has you.

Wordless, you open your mismatched arms, and into them she steps.

** >Show her          **

She does not flinch when she sees you for what you have become, your missing limbs, your burnt-out eye, the glowing Fade-stuff that replaced them. Curious, uncertain, she reaches with her remaining hand (she never reached out first, before) to touch the one you’re not-quite missing. Being touched there does not feel the same, it is not flesh, you don’t feel her mortal warmth. But you feel it, all the same.

Oh, she says, you’re like me, now (the fade was in her too, you realize).

From within you Hubris revels and rejoices; from within you Hubris calls out _YES_

** >>          **

She tells you what happened behind that final mirror through which you could not follow, and so you learn of Solas’s plan. It sounds familiar to you. As though you thought of it before.

You are not so sure that it is evil.

You have gone many places, and you have seen much. Why should the destruction of the veil bring an end to the world you know? You have reason to believe it would be augmented, not destroyed. Are you not all poorer, for your estrangement from the Fade?

You tell her so, half-flinching, but what she says is—

Yes, she thinks you’re right.

Why not, she says. Oh, hell, why not!

And she laughs and laughs and laughs and grabs you by your front and kisses you all teeth and laughter, because, why not, oh, hell, why not, _why not_

**> You can’t think of a reason      **

Lavellan dissolves the Inquisition, takes you, and disappears without a trace

Did she change while you were gone? Or was this Lavellan all along, and you too blind with misguided longing to see her as she was? (Hubris likes her as she is.)

**> You go to seek the Dread Wolf          **

He is not an easy man to find, but you are not so easily dissuaded. You have failed your quest; she has completed hers—and neither of you anywhere to return to. What have you to lose?

You do track him down, eventually. You offer him a deal.

**> But hardly any kind of choice          **

So it is the three of you, against the world. You are here to build a better one.

At least you are, anyway. Solas really thinks he will destroy it (and is willing to, at that), and Lavellan is just here to watch it burn, but you are not convinced. The world will change, you’re sure, but it will change for good. For the better.

There is only the matter of willing it to being.

If you had doubts that Solas loved Lavellan you do not have them now. In her turn she loves you, and maybe him, and you love her, too, and him; but your fool heart will love anyone it meets. And Hubris, well—Hubris loves you best.

Solas cannot bear to look at her. He doesn’t need to look, Lavellan says. She doesn’t need him looking.

Lavellan is not afraid to push. Too long has she held back, and now it's loose, all the parts of her that you so badly wished to know. There is no bound she does not wish for you to break, no piece of you she would not see snapped for sheer curiosity. And it is good, your rebecoming, you must leave your old self far behind, it will not do to be the self formed in a darker time. 

There is precious little left of you, the boy from the Tower.

A better world, a brighter world, this is what you fight for, this is what you will become.

**> Accelerate          **

The world drowns in the green, your doing, yours and his and hers.

Lavellan’s final kiss of cheerful resignation burns of verdant fire.

You are falling, and everything is falling, and you are the one who pushed—

**> See what happens when you allow yourself these things?          **

** <<          ** **< <          ** **< <** **< <          ** **< <** **< <** **< <**

Now, then—who did you leave behind, again?

** >Nobody. There was nobody.**

Despair?

** >Oh, hell, why not**

You give up. That’s the long and short of it. You just give up. You get so sick of being what and who you are that you just go ahead and stop.

You are tired, tired, tired, and you have fought for long enough. You give up and are subsumed.

The _new_ you was never a boy in a high cold tower. The new you never loved. The new you dwelt in your demesne and observed and _wanted._

Now you have it.

You came to that dark place of answers alone, and you leave it, alone. You walk the fields and forest and survey them with new eyes.

Nobody knew you came here. There is nobody to stop you. This new world is yours for the taking, whoever this new _you_ is.

** <<**

** >No!**

You fight. You wrestle the demon Hubris to the very last.

Inside your own soul you face it, refracted endlessly within.

It is you and the demon and the demon and you and it takes your form and you take its form and you remember being a man and you remember being a demon and you remember you remember you remember. You wrestle until you realize you are wrestling only yourself, and that no one else is there.

In the end there is only you

In the end there is always a choice.

** >Go back                                                  **


	10. Chapter 10

#  **X.**

** >Go home          **

** <<          **  **< <          **  **< <          **  **< <          **  **< <**  **< <**  **< <**

 ** <<**  **< <**  **< <          **  **< <**

 ** <<**  **< <**  **< <**  **< <**

 ** <<**  **< <**  **< <**  **< <**

 ** <<          **  **< <**

** <<**

** <<**

It needs to be you that speaks to Solas. It needs to be you that tells him what will happen should his plan go forward, that it won't work the way he thinks. You need to tell him how to fix it. For that, you'll need his trust, and what more his respect. You'll never have that as just another flat-ear. There is but one way to get it.

You have always lived in the Tower.

But not for long.

 ** >This time you will get it ** **_right_ **

Escape is trivial this time. You know exactly what to wait for. This time when you disappear into the wilds, you know where to go. You know the places they will overlook.

** >>**

Here you settle in to wait, and plan.

** >>**

** >>**

** >>**

** >>**

** >>**

** >>**

** >>**

** >>**

** >>**

** >>**

When it is time, you make your way to the Conclave. You see a hundred familiar faces, but they do not see you.

You put yourself exactly where you need to be

** >Pick up the orb**

You have heard about this part, but never experienced it yourself. You do not care for being put in chains, for being pushed around by some Templar woman who thinks she has the right. You cooperate just long enough. You close a few rifts, make a few friends. You are no good with people, but you can mimic one who is.

The first chance you get, you run. You make for the mage rebellion.

** >>**

Only you can close the rifts; as such, you become a popular man. With your uncanny ability to seemingly predict the future, you become an influential man. No formal body ever elects you leader—but within a few months, you have gone from yet another mouth to feed, to the vanguard of the revolution. You are the Herald of Andraste, and you have made your preference clear.

It is said that Andraste herself wishes the mages to be free.

You came upon them as a storm comes upon a ship becalmed. Where did you come from? How do you know these things? Nobody knows, but precious few question. More than a few believe you truly divine.

(You search for a Tranquil man from Kinloch hold, but turn up naught. Even with your arts, some things are not to be. You mourn, but not for long—there are other worlds than these.)

** >>**

Soon enough the helpless dregs of the headless Inquisition have no choice but to come begging on their knees to what is now mage rebellion.

You graciously agree to become their Inquisitor, on a certain set of preconditions. You will not tolerate a Templar commander. You will have the mages freed. You declare enemies of the mage rebellion enemies of the Inquisition, too.

What choice do they have but to acquiesce?

You defend them, you save them. That is what heroes are meant to do. You are not the Hero of Ferelden (you hear it was a woman from the Denerim alienage that slayed the beast), but your legend will be no lesser.

** >>**

The Dread Wolf thinks it's desperately funny, this gambit that you've pulled. He is curious when he looks at you, not quite comprehending what you are, not quite certain how to place you.

You visit with him often, as much as you can spare. You have heard all of his stories time and again before, but still you listen. Dread Wolf, they call him, your mild-mannered friend who hates the taste of tea and loves to paint and has a thousand things to say. He is a monster, too.

** >>**

Half-dead and buried in the snow, utterly alone for the first time in many months (no Calling in your veins, no demon in your soul, no Sorrows in your mind), a peace falls over you. How easy to imagine that there are not thousands anxious for your return.  How pleasant it would be to stay here and be alone, become an unbounded self. How lovely it would be to spared the burden of being witnessed.

How lovely, and how vile.

You get up. You've work to do.

** >>**

In Skyhold, Leliana’s letter brings you Warden-Commander Tabris, a small sharp woman who consists solely of straight lines and metal casing. You remember her a thousand different ways. You remember her anger and her love, her dirty jokes, her ugly laugh, her clever eyes, her careful hands. You remember what she meant to you. You remember what she did to you.

She introduces herself stiffly, all formal propriety—if she has any inkling that you are the same Devon Surana from her distant childhood, your rank makes this impossible to suggest.

You catch her staring, sometimes, with her sharp black eyes that glitter. Does she know, does she remember?

You still love her. You have never stopped loving anybody ever in your life.

** >>**

You gain two agents for your reformed Inquisition, a brother and a sister, who hail from Clan Lavellan. The sister does most of their talking. The brother mostly grunts. The sister laughs and snorts and seems so glad to be alive. There is no brittleness to her, no precipice, no fear. She is her clan's First. She has everything to hope for. The brother is big and awkward, no dram of the imperious command you so associate with him. He is whole and in some ways still half a child. You are so glad to have them back.

The longing nearly breaks you (you loved it when they needed you), but they are better off this way, as these strangers not at all like the people you once knew. You thought you knew them, but did you, really? Did they know you?

Did anyone know you?

Did  _you_ know you?

** >>**

The Choice Spirit sneers at your coming. He tells you, don't you know that there's always a choice?

You nod. You do know.

You let him live this time.

** >>**

You meet the former Witch of the Wilds at the ball at the Winter Palace. You remember her in rags, with dirt and twigs in her filthy hair, with nails fit to puncture. Here she is smooth and polished as a stone tossed by the sea, and she has no idea who you are—save that you are presently the most powerful man in Thedas.

She catches your wistful smile, your distant eyes. If she suspects, she does not say.

** >>**

The boy whose soul is that of an old god looks at you with eyes nothing like yours. He sprung from another man’s seed (you do not ask whose), but he has not changed.

He tells you—you can't fool me, I remember.

You nod. You remember, too.

** >>**

Away from prying eyes, the former Witch of the Wilds shows you her eluvian. You follow her into the silver plane (yes, you remember).

You stand surrounded by reflections. You turn and turn and turn again, and there is always, only, you.

You have entered the hall of mirrors.

** >The only thing reflected is yourself**

** >>**

You defeat the ancient darkspawn magister of course you do you prodigy, of course of course of

** >course**

And so you stand at the top of it all, quite alone and quite assured. The Witch of the Wilds disappears to parts unknown. The Warden-Commander makes for Weisshaupt. The twins Lavellan depart for their forest home. Your so-called inner circle slowly scatters—when last you knew them, they neither liked nor trusted you. You never forgot what you saw in their eyes—you were the same man then as you are now, and you kept your heart closed to them. As such they leave you, too.

You rest on your laurels and wait. You intend to enjoy your left arm while you have it.

** >>**

** >>**

You have entered the hall of mirrors. Solas smiles guiltily, as though he knows anything about anything—he suspects you have questions.

You shake your head. Not really.

But you do have a proposition.

His plan. No, don't ask how you can know of it. The two of you can get it  _right_ this time. The way he wants to do it, it won’t work, but it still could, you’re sure of it. You just need to get it right.

But Solas is shaking his head.

He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t remember. And he pities you, too, pities the pain you are in, pities the depth of your ignorance, pities that you are not quite a person. Pities that you are just like everyone else in your world, your soul a shallow puddle when it might have been a well.

Lavellan told you what he said here, twice at least before—but it is different, to hear for yourself the soft-edged contempt in his kindly voice, to see the naked truth about yourself reflected in his eyes.

And isn’t he right? Are you truly a person? You are experience, you are sensation, you are awareness, but are you a person?

He saves your life, then disappears into the mirror behind him. You are left bleeding on your knees.

You don’t know what you expected.

** >Are we really doing this again?**

No...no, you suppose that you are not.

** >Go back**

** <<**

** <<**

** <<**

You defeat the ancient darkspawn magister of course you do you prodigy, of course, of course, of 

**> course**

As before you find Solas kneeling with the two halves of the broken orb

You ask of him, is there no saving it?

He thinks you mean the orb, and shakes his head for no. His shoulders hitch. No, there is no saving it.

You crush his heart inside his chest.

Trivial, with blood magic. And who to question you, when you say he was a traitor? Who to question the most powerful man in Thedas, when he decides a man must cease to be, and deigns to makes him so?

In two more years, you will die in agony, and there will be no one to save you—and the Veil will hold. The world will be ever as it was.

In the meantime you mourn your friend, mourn history and legacy. You mourn all that might have been and all that was already not. Your mourn infinities collapsing at either of your sides.

There is more grief welling in your body than in all the bitter pools upon this earth, and it is as a tiny drop.

** >>**

Don't you know that there's always a choice?

** >>**

You enter through the eluvian into the crossroads, into the hall of mirrors. You wander through its misty corridors, alone and not alone, faced with a thousand faces all your own.

You stay there until your throat is parched and you are weak with hunger.

You touch the glass and it is warm like breath, like blood. Your fingers trace one surface and another. Here you were a father, there you were happy; here you loved, there you were loved. Here you did good; there you did evil. Here you died for it; there you killed it. But of the reflections you recall, there are a billion billion that you don't. What paths did you not take? What fates did not befall you?

Were you ever a person? Were you ever a monster?

Can you go back?

**> Go Back**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [my tumblr](http://wombuttress.tumblr.com/)   
>  [my oc blog. More about this Surana here.](http://pile-of-dragon-filth.tumblr.com/tagged/devon%20surana)


End file.
